Nov 292022
 
 November 29, 2022  Posted by at 1:37 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  22 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Autumn landscape 1885

 

 

I’m not sure if what I’m going to tell you would officially be called a shadow ban, but it sure feels like it. A few years ago, we noticed that our ad revenues, then from Google, which had been falling for a while, had plummeted by some 80% from high to lowest. On top of that, at some point Google started sending Policy Violation mails. Which say “you violated our policies”, without ever specifying in what way(s). Now, you could read through all these policies, and guess at what you have done “wrong” and delete the “offending” material, you could delete the entire post, or you can just ignore these mails.

Given that we have no intention of having someone else decide what we write, ignoring them seems the only option. If they decide what we can say, we might as well not say it. What’s the use? If the web is to have any function at all, it will always be to provide diverse opinions. In that, we very much agree with Elon Musk. But yes, through the interference of companies like Google we have moved in the opposite direction. First with Trump, than with Covid, and now with Ukraine. Media and politics are hellbent on wiping out any views and ideas that don’t conform to theirs, but there is no future in that.

 

With the declining revenues, and the violation mails, we decided to look beyond Google for ad providers. Google had a total monopoly in the field before, but there appeared to be other, smaller companies popping up that offered some competition. The 80% revenue drop at first looked to us like Google was simply taking a bigger part of what came in, and that is certainly part of what happened, but there was also something else. That we initially didn’t recognize. Now we do.

We did a number of trial runs with alternative ad providers, which typically started at a promising level, and then all fell down to “Google levels”. These trial runs take months, you have to give the new provider time to get their end right etc. I think we tried 4-5 of them, over a 2-3 year period. Once they’re down to 20% of the initial highs of years ago, you think: this doesn’t improve the situation. And you wonder why, is it their effort, is it their models, it’s hard to see at times. And then the last company we tried sort of opened our eyes.

We had spent quite a bit of time setting things up with them, video calls, mails etc. We in this is me and invaluable friend Danny, who keeps an eye on the back end of TAE. We have good visitor and page view numbers, and one stat that I like a lot, and that should appeal to advertisers a lot. The bounce rate when people log in is close to 30%, which seems normal. But even with that, the average time spent on the site is almost 5 minutes. An advertisers’ dream, or so you would think. But then, just as we were ready to launch with them a few weeks ago, they blew it off.

They said: it’s no use doing this, our biggest advertisers don’t want to work with you. Not good news, but enlightening. This has undoubtedly been a factor in all the trial runs we did, all the way back to and including Google, but nobody ever told us. And why did they not want to work with us? Not because they did their own research, they have other things to worry about. There’s only one source I can imagine them basing this on, and that takes us back to Google. Who have built up a file, a database, of websites they issue Policy Violation mails to.

“Don’t trust those guys, they don’t toe the line. They offer alternative views on Covid and Ukraine”. The end result is that for now we don’t have any ads. I went back to our Google AdSense page, thinking maybe we could go back to their generic ads for a bit, and there are two warnings there now.

• Ads are disabled on one or more of your sites – no ads are serving on one or more of your sites because of policy violations. Please investigate the reasons for this in the Policy Center.

• Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war.

Yes, it sounds exactly like what Musk found at Twitter. Just on a much smaller scale. Twitter banned lots of doctors that didn’t parrot Fauci and Pfizer, tried to ruin their careers and reputations. And now we have plastic blood clots, heart attacks and dying and disabled children. Twitter also won’t allow anything but NATO narratives about Ukraine. And now we have one country in the dark, and a whole continent about to experience something similar, while being forced to pay for the pleasure. No amount of Policy Violation warnings can turn that around. But Google’s “policies” are the same as “the old” Twitter’s.

We cannot think for ourselves. Someone else, organized in groups, wants to do our thinking for us. And tells themselves they have the right to do so. Nay, the obligation, lest we stray from their path. Not only do we find that path uninteresting, it would also mean the Automatic Earth can stop publishing. We don’t intend to do that. But at the same time we realize what we’re up against. We are lucky to have people donating on Paypal and Patreon, but losing $400-$1,000 per month from ads of course still hurts. Who knows anymore what an uninterrupted ad revenue stream would look like by now?

Just thought I’d let you know.

 

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site. Thank you for your support.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Dec 282020
 


Eugene Delacroix Greece expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi 1826

 

 

A little personal thank you note from the Automatic Earth is in order. 2020 has been an annus horribilis across the world, but we have been blessed with lots of attention and comments, as well as great support from our readers throughout the year, both for the Automatic Earth itself and for the Monastiraki social kitchen in Athens. Problem is, I have so many people to say thank you to.

We started covering the coronavirus early on, in January, and never looked back. Many people got their first exposure to the virus through us (pun very much intended). What developed throughout 2020 was not just a solid reader-base, but also a maturing comments section, that taught me as much as it did readers.

Thank you for that. The comments from medical professionals and others became a strong part of the entire story. And it was by no means a one-sided thing; opinions were always all over the place, as they should be.

That’s the big problem in my view that we face these days: our media have become one-dimensional, the exact opposite of what they should be. This became clear through the Trump era, and the incessant hammering of one actor vs the deafening silence about all others in the same theater and on the same stage.

 

And we see that again today: try, if you can, to find in the MSM a critical opinion about lockdowns, or facemasks, or about the newly-fangled vaccines. It’s very hard if not impossible. This one-dimensionality hides behind “the science”. Which is something that doesn’t really exist, as we know because scientists in different countries contradict each other, as do those in the same country, and scientists even often contradict themselves.

If you want people to “follow the science”, you need to convince them that this is the right thing to do. You can’t just force them to do it. Or, rather, you can try that for a short period of time, and then they will come after you. People don’t live their lives in one dimension; they can’t.

Are facemasks useful? Sure, in crowded indoor spaces. But outdoors? I have yet to see the first evidence of that, and I do read an awful lot. Let’s inject some nuance here: if there is a risk of 1 in 100,000 that someone gets infected outdoors, it that worth forcing 99,999 people to put facemasks on? Or would you rather ask them to wear those where it demonstrably matters?

Are lockdowns useful? Sure, but they can only ever be emergency measures, short and “sweet”. Because they risk destroying entire economies and societies. Lockdowns should only be used when there are no other measures available anymore.

But we haven’t exhausted the scope of all other measures, not at all. There are no governments promoting the large scale use of vitamin D, or the proper use of hydroxychloroquine, and Chris Martenson even sees his videos about ivermectin banned from YouTube. As all three substances show great promise in preventing infections, and/or limiting the consequences of being infected.

We’ve been reduced to one-dimensional lives. By now, politicians and “scientists” would rather see everyone be infected, and then “cured” by a vaccine, then not get infected in the first place. In one dimension, the world easily gets turned upside down. You just wouldn’t be able to see it, because you need three dimensions to recognize what “upside down” looks like.

 

The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines may work very well, but we don’t know, because we haven’t researched that. Which, if you want to “follow the science”, is a very strange thing to do. Of course we would all like the virus to be gone, but ignoring the science doesn’t look like the way to achieve that. And that’s what we’re doing: we’re not following the science, we’re ignoring it where that fits our purposes.

We don’t know if the Pfizer vaccine protects you from being infected, we don’t know if it keeps you from infecting others, but we do know governments and airlines are talking about requiring evidence that you’ve received a dose. But for what purpose, then, exactly? Just to let all the MPs and CEOs people claim they did what they could?

-Too- many people have lost their jobs and their businesses without any country seriously having tried to stop people from becoming infected through the use of vit. D, HCQ, ivermectin. Many of these jobs and businesses will never come back. Is this worth it? Maybe if we could say we tried everything we could, but we obviously haven’t.

We sold our souls to the “science” and then to the vaccine. Which are two very very different things.

If there’s ever been a time to ask questions, it must be now. About lockdowns, facemasks and viruses, about people, communities, societies, economies. That we are being pressured into not asking those questions, makes them even more necessary.

 

Anyway, those are all issues and questions that will need to be addressed in 2021, we’ve run out of 2020 time. It’s just that it wouldn’t have been necessary; we could easily have done much if not most of it this year. But we have become information-poor, and by design to boot. Which is the opposite of what the Automatic Earth wants to be and do. We want to present all the information, and that without paywalls or things like that.

There are too many of those already, and their main effect is to restrict information at a time when people arguably need more of it. Our model of increasingly relying on donations has worked out alright in 2020, and we hope the same will be true in the new year. Thank you again so kindly for making that possible.

 

A last word, again, about the Monastiraki kitchen: when you see things get harder for yourself, as so many have, it should be a natural reflex to wonder how they are for those less fortunate, because it’s a safe bet they will be hit even harder. It took me way too long to learn that. The team at the kitchen have that down: give, give, and never take. Enormous thanks to all of them.

That you allow me to support them is an honor, and a great responsibility which I take very seriously, both to those who donate and those who receive. Thank you, all of you.

One day when you’re old, and you ask yourself what has been the most important thing you did in your life, the answer will have to be what you did for other people. That is both the only possible outcome, and it’s also at the same time the very thing that is threatened most by the incessant lockdowns and facemask mandates. People need people.

Have a great 2021, stick with the Automatic Earth, and stick with each other.

 

 

 

We try to run the Automatic Earth on donations. Since ad revenue has collapsed, you are now not just a reader, but an integral part of the process that builds this site.

Click at the top of the sidebars for Paypal and Patreon donations. Thank you for your support.

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime, election time, all the time. Click at the top of the sidebars to donate with Paypal and Patreon.

 

Dec 052019
 
 December 5, 2019  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein Interior of migratory fruit worker’s tent, Yakima, Washington Jul 1936

 

The Market Will Need The Fed Again In 2020 (Axios)
The Repo Market Is Broken And Fed Injections Are Not A Lasting Solution (MW)
Is Something Broken? Quants Running “Scared” As Nothing Makes Sense (ZH)
Legal Experts Called By Democrats Say Trump’s Actions Are Impeachable (R.)
Gaetz Grills Impeachment Witnesses Over Democratic Donations (Fox)
Judiciary Committee Member: Unfair, Politically Biased Ordeal (USAT)
The 10 Most Important Revelations From The Russia Probe FISA Report (Solomon)
Illinois’ Unfunded Pension Liability Rises To $137.3 Billion (R.)
China Set To Make History With Record Number Of Bond Defaults In 2019 (ZH)
France Braces For Biggest Strikes Of Macron’s Presidency (G.)
Uber Faces £1,500,000,000 Bill For Unpaid VAT (Metro)
Julian Assange in Videoconference: The Spanish Case Takes a Turn (IPD)

 

 

The Fed will never be able to get out. That was clear the moment they stepped in.

The Market Will Need The Fed Again In 2020 (Axios)

The No.1 risk to the stock market continuing its outperformance next year is not President Trump or consistently weak U.S. economic data or even China, senior analysts at John Hancock Investment Management say, but whether or not the Fed continues to stimulate the economy through what they call “not QE.” What it means: Fed chair Jerome Powell has insisted the central bank’s bond buying program — initiated after rates in the systemically important repo market spiked to five times their normal level in September — is not quantitative easing. But “it walks and talks” like QE, analysts say, and has injected close to $1 trillion of liquidity into the repo market and added more than $260 billion to the Fed’s balance sheet.

The intrigue: The new “not QE” program was “like a fourth rate cut this year,” John Hancock co-chief investment strategist Matthew Miskin said during a media briefing Tuesday in New York. And it has given a boost to the stock market. The big picture: “The equity market has benefited from a super aggressive Fed,” Ethan Harris, head of global economics at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, told Axios during a separate event Tuesday at BAML headquarters. “I mean the Fed basically anesthetized the markets to the trade war escalation this summer.”

Because the Fed was able to mask the economy’s pain from the market, a strong sell-off may be needed to motivate the Trump administration to secure what Harris calls a “skinny” trade deal with China and avert the Dec. 15 tariffs that will hit billions of dollars worth of consumer goods. The converse is also true, Miskin argued. “If things turn more sour because we’re not getting a trade deal or the tariffs go on Dec. 15, the stress underpinning … the market will re-emerge and the Fed’s definitely going to have to be there,” he told Axios.

Read more …

End the Fed.

The Repo Market Is Broken And Fed Injections Are Not A Lasting Solution (MW)

The Federal Reserve’s ongoing efforts to shore up the short-term “repo” lending markets have begun to rattle some market experts. The New York Federal Reserve has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to keep credit flowing through short term money markets since mid-September when a shortage of liquidity caused a spike in overnight borrowing rates. But as the Fed’s interventions have entered a third month, concerns about the market’s dependence on its daily doses of liquidity have grown. “The big picture answer is that the repo market is broken,” said James Bianco, founder of Bianco Research in Chicago, in an interview with MarketWatch. “They are essentially medicating the market into submission,” he said. “But this is not a long-term solution.”

This chart shows the more than $320 billion of total repo market support from the Fed since Sept. 17, when for the central bank began pumping in daily liquidity after overnight lending rates jumped to almost 10% from nearly 2%. Initially, the central bank rolled out roughly $75 billion in daily lending facilities to arm Wall Street’s core set of primary dealers with low-cost overnight loans to keep the roughly $1 trillion daily U.S. Treasury repo market running. The facilities allow banks to snap up loans by pledging safe-haven U.S. Treasurys or agency mortgage-backed securities with the New York Fed, but crucially without the typical risk-based pricing that lenders regularly charge when funding each other.

Read more …

“..the answer is yes: the market is broken, and you can thank central banks for that.”

Is Something Broken? Quants Running “Scared” As Nothing Makes Sense (ZH)

It was a year where the S&P put the mini bear market of December 2018 in the dust, and after a dramatic reversal which saw most central banks flip from hawkish to dovish throughout the year…

… the MSCI World index is just shy of its January 2018 highs, and the S&P has returned an impressive 24% (despite the jittery start to December), and stands at all time record highs, despite, paradoxically, a year of record equity fund outflow. On paper, this should have been a great year for investors after a dismal 2018. In reality, however, 2019 has been just as painful for not just for hedge funds, which have substantially underperformed the S&P again and in October saw a record 8 consecutive months of outflows, the most since the financial crisis…

… but especially for quants, which after a relatively solid year, suffered the September quant crash that destroyed most of their YTD gains, and have generally been unable to find their bearings in a year in which nothing seemed to work. It’s also Georg Elsaesser, a Frankfurt-based fund manager at Invesco, is trying to calm down his newbie quant clients as choppy stock moves make life difficult for anyone trading factors, which wire up all those systematic portfolios on Wall Street. “Some of them are kind of scared,” Elsaesser told Bloomberg. “They’re asking the questions: Is something going wrong? Is something broken?” Well actually, the answer is yes: the market is broken, and you can thank central banks for that.

Read more …

All three are Democrat donors who have a deep dislike of Trump. They couldn’t hide that, didn’t even try, instead went on RussiaRussia rants.

But this was supposed to be about the Constitution, not about their opinions. Turley was the only one who stuck to what was on the table.

Legal Experts Called By Democrats Say Trump’s Actions Are Impeachable (R.)

The hearing on Wednesday was the committee’s first to examine whether Trump’s actions qualify as “high crimes and misdemeanors” punishable by impeachment under the U.S. Constitution. Three law professors chosen by the Democrats made clear during the lengthy session that they believed Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses. “If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable,” said University of North Carolina law professor Michael Gerhardt. But George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who was invited by the Republicans, said he did not see clear evidence of illegal conduct. He said the inquiry was moving too quickly and lacked testimony from people with direct knowledge of the relevant events.

“One can oppose President Trump’s policies or actions but still conclude that the current legal case for impeachment is not just woefully inadequate, but in some respects, dangerous, as the basis for the impeachment of an American president,” said Turley, who added that he did not vote for Trump. [..] Republicans focused their questions on Turley, who largely backed up their view that Democrats had not made the case for impeachment – although he did say that leveraging U.S. military aid to investigate a political opponent “if proven, can be an impeachable offense.” Democrats sought to buttress their case by focusing their questions on the other three experts – Gerhardt, Harvard University law professor Noah Feldman and Stanford University law professor Pam Karlan – who said impeachment was justified.

Karlan drew a sharp response from Republicans for a remark about how Trump did not enjoy the unlimited power of a king. “While the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron,” she said. White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham on Twitter called Karlan “classless,” and first lady Melania Trump said Karlan should be “ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering” for mentioning her 13-year-old son.

Read more …

Matt Taibbi: “We laughed at this logic when George W. Bush used it to justify his Mideast wars: “We will fight them over there so we do not have to face them in the United States of America.”

Michael Tracey: “This woman was ostensibly called to testify about the legal and Constitutional questions around impeachment and instead ends up going on a bizarre Cold Warrior rant implying that Russia plans to invade the United States”

Gaetz Grills Impeachment Witnesses Over Democratic Donations (Fox)

Turning to the professors, he asked UNC-Chapel Hill Professor Michael Gerhardt to confirm that he donated to President Barack Obama. “My family did, yes,” Gerhardt responded. Shifting his attention to Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman, Gaetz noted the educator has written several articles that portray Trump in a negative light. “Mar-a-Lago ad belongs in impeachment file,” Gaetz said, repeating the title of an April 2017 piece Feldman wrote for Bloomberg Opinion. Gaetz further pressed Feldman, asking him: “Do you believe you’re outside of the political mainstream on the question of impeachment?” Responding to Gaetz, Feldman said impeachment is warranted whenever a president abuses their power for personal gain or when they “corrupt the democratic process.”

The professor added he was an “impeachment skeptic” until the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. After the exchange, Gaetz turned to Stanford Law Professor Pamela Karlan and challenged her on reported four-figure donations to Clinton, Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. “Why so much more for Hillary than the other two?” he added, smiling. The Florida lawmaker went on to criticize Karlan for a remark she made while answering an earlier question by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas. Karlan had told Jackson Lee that there is a difference between what Trump can do as president and the powers of a medieval king. “The Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility, so while the president can name his son ‘Barron’, he can’t make him a baron.”

Gaetz fumed at the remark, saying it does not lend “credibility” to her argument. “When you invoke the president’s son’s name here, when you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump… it makes you look mean, it makes you look like you are attacking someone’s family: the minor child of the president of the United States.”

Read more …

Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., serves on the House Judiciary Committee.

Judiciary Committee Member: Unfair, Politically Biased Ordeal (USAT)

By now we have all heard the news that President Donald Trump’s counsel will not be participating in the House Judiciary Committee’s first impeachment hearing Wednesday. As a member of the committee, I believe President Trump has made the right decision. In their obsession and rush to impeach the president by the end of the year, Democrats have rigged the process from the start. I wouldn’t blame anyone, let alone the president, for being skeptical about this unfair process. Closed door secret meetings, selectively leaked details, refusing to allow Republican witnesses, and releasing the Schiff report and witness list right before the hearing all indicate an unfair, politically biased ordeal.


With little to no information provided by Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, right now it appears anything goes. The president was provided little notice and no indication of who would be the witnesses or if there would be additional hearings. This leaves more questions than answers as we head into the next phase of an already tainted process. House Democrats do not seem to grasp that they cannot legitimize such an illegitimate process halfway through. This process has been unfair for the president and the Republicans from the start, with Democrats ignoring the historical precedents outlined in the Clinton and Nixon impeachments. When it comes to Trump, Democrats have created a whole new set of rules. For them, the end justifies the means, no matter how devoid of due process and fairness those means are.

Read more …

I don’t have space for all 10, but Solomon is a must read.

The 10 Most Important Revelations From The Russia Probe FISA Report (Solomon)

Derogatory information about informant Christopher Steele The FBI stated to the court in a footnote that it was unaware of any derogatory information about the former MI6 agent it was using as “confidential human source 1” in the Russia case. This claim could face a withering analysis in the report. Congressional sources have reported to me that during a recent unclassified meeting they were told the British government flagged concerns about Steele and his reliance on “sub-sources” of intelligence as early as 2015. Bruce Ohr testified he told FBI and DOJ officials early on that he suspected Steele’s intelligence was mostly raw and needed vetting, that Steele was working with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in some capacity and appeared desperate to defeat Trump in the 2016 election.

And documents show State Department official Kathleen Kavalec alerted the FBI eight days before the first FISA warrant was obtained that Steele may have been peddling a now-debunked rumor that Trump and Vladimir Putin were secretly communicating through a Russian bank’s computer server. Most experts I talked with say each of these revelations might constitute derogatory information that should be disclosed to the court. On a related note, Horowitz just released a separate report that concluded the FBI is doing a poor job of vetting informants like Steele, suggesting there was a culture of withholding derogatory information from informants’ reliability and credibility validation reports.

News leaks as evidence One of Horowitz’s earlier investigative reports that recommended fired FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for possible prosecution put an uncomfortable spotlight on the bureau’s culture of news leaks. Since then, a handful of other cases unrelated to Russia have raised additional questions about whether the FBI uses news leaks to create or cite evidence in courts. One key to watch in the Horowitz report is the analysis of whether it was appropriate for the FBI to use a Yahoo News article as validating evidence to support Steele’s dossier. We now know from testimony and court filings that Steele, his dossier and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson played a role in that Yahoo News story.

Read more …

It’s not just the Fed, but they haven’t exactly helped.

Illinois’ Unfunded Pension Liability Rises To $137.3 Billion (R.)

Illinois’ growing unfunded pension liability, which increased by $3.8 billion to $137.3 billion at the end of fiscal 2019, underscores the need for state action to boost funding or cut costs, analysts said on Wednesday. The increase was fueled by actuarially insufficient state contributions and lower-than-expected investment returns, according to a new state legislative report. Illinois has the lowest credit ratings among U.S. states at a notch or two above the junk level due to its huge unfunded pension liability and chronic structural budget deficit.


Eric Kim, a Fitch Ratings analyst, said growth in the unfunded liability is expected to continue as long as contributions lag actuarial requirements and pension benefits are protected under the Illinois Constitution. “For us, what this all speaks to is the state addressing fundamental structural budget challenges,” he said. Earlier this year, Governor J.B. Pritzker created pension task forces, including one to explore asset sales to boost pension funding. Laurence Msall, president of Chicago-based government finance watchdog the Civic Federation, said the state has not effectively attacked core pension problems, including unsustainable costs. “At best Illinois is running in place, while trying to avoid sliding downhill,” he said.

Read more …

A normal market phenomenon?

China Set To Make History With Record Number Of Bond Defaults In 2019 (ZH)

While China is bracing for what may be a historic D-Day event on December 9, when the “unprecedented” default of state-owned, commodity-trading conglomerate Tewoo with $38 billion in assets may take place, it has already been a banner year for Chinese bankruptcies. According to Bloomberg data, China is set to hit another dismal milestone in 2019 when a record amount of onshore bonds are set to default, confirming that something is indeed cracking in China’s financial system and “testing the government’s ability to keep financial markets stable as the economy slows and companies struggle to cope with unprecedented levels of debt.”

After a brief lull in the third quarter, a burst of at least 15 new defaults since the start of November have sent the year’s total to 120.4 billion yuan ($17.1 billion), and set to eclipse the 121.9 billion yuan annual record in 2018. The good news is that this number still represents a tiny fraction of China’s $4.4 trillion onshore corporate bond market; the bad news is that the rapidly rising number is approaching a tipping point that could unleash a default cascade, and in the process fueling concerns of potential contagion as investors struggle to gauge which companies have Beijing’s support. As Bloomberg notes, policy makers have been walking a tightrope as they try to roll back the implicit guarantees that have long distorted Chinese debt markets, without dragging down an economy already weakened by the trade war and tepid global growth.

Read more …

The French know how to strike.

France Braces For Biggest Strikes Of Macron’s Presidency (G.)

Emmanuel Macron is braced for the biggest strikes of his presidency as French rail workers, air-traffic controllers, teachers and public sector staff take to the streets on Thursday against proposed changes to the pension system. French rail transport is expected to almost completely grind to a halt with 82% of drivers on strike and at least 90% of regional trains cancelled, amid fears that the transport disruption could continue for days. In Paris, 11 out of 16 metro lines will shut completely, with commuters scrambling to hire bikes and scooters. Many schools will close and even some police unions have even warned of “symbolic” closures of certain police stations. Shops along the route of a march in Paris have been advised to close in case of violence on the edges of the demonstration. About half of the scheduled Eurostar trains between Paris and London have been cancelled.


The standoff is a crucial test for the centrist French president, whose planned overhaul of the pensions system was a key election promise. The government argues that unifying the pensions system – and getting rid of the 42 “special” regimes for sectors ranging from rail and energy workers to lawyers and Paris Opera staff – is crucial to keep the system financially viable as the French population ages. But unions say introducing a “universal” system for all will mean millions of workers in both the public and private sectors must work beyond the legal retirement age of 62 or face a severe drop in the value of their pensions. The row cuts to the heart of Macron’s presidential project and his promise to deliver the biggest transformation of the French social model and welfare system since the postwar era.

Read more …

Does Uber have more lawyers than drivers?

Uber Faces £1,500,000,000 Bill For Unpaid VAT (Metro)

Car-sharing giant Uber is a step closer to being liable for an estimated £1.5 billion in unpaid UK tax. Campaigners have won an important legal step that could pave the way for the taxman to come knocking on the beleaguered firm’s door. The move is on top of another legal challenge to stop Uber operating in London. Uber has long-argued that it is a platform that brings drivers and riders together, rather than a transport business. This means that it falls to individual drivers to pay VAT on any rides instead of the company itself. But as the threshold for VAT is only for individuals earning more than £85,000 a year, none of the drivers need to charge it. Campaigners from the Good Law Project calculates this has cost the public £1.5 billion in lost revenue so far.


The law team initially attempted to take Uber to court to force them to disclose their tax affairs but the case looked like being too expensive. Instead, they challenged HM Revenues and Customs and demanded the taxman assess Uber for VAT liabilities. HMRC objected, saying its dealings with Uber were commercially sensitive and it should not have to disclose whether or not it is investigating. Today the Court of Appeal rejected HMRC’s arguments and Mrs Justice Lieven said HMRC now had to disclose whether or not they had made an assessment over Uber’s payment of VAT. The case for the Good Law Project is being led by anti-Brexit campaigner Jolyon Maugham QC who said: ‘The more time passes without an assessment being raised the more VAT is lost – forever.’

Read more …

Again, Assange -with his aides- is the only person who has abided by the law. All other parties involved have not. That should have a huge bearing on the case.

Julian Assange in Videoconference: The Spanish Case Takes a Turn (IPD)

The UK Central Authority has had a change of heart. On December 20, Assange is set to be transferred from his current maximum-security abode, Belmarsh, to Westminster Magistrates Court to answer questions that will be posed by De la Mata. To date, the evidence on Morales and the conduct of his organisation is bulking and burgeoning. It is said that the company refurbished the security equipment of the London Ecuadorean embassy in 2017, during which Morales installed surveillance cameras equipped with microphone facilities. While Ecuadorean embassy officials sought to reassure Assange that no recordings of his private conversations with journalists or legal officials were taking place, the opposite proved true.

An unconvinced Assange sought to counter such measures with his own methods. He spoke to guests in the women’s bathroom. He deployed a “squelch box” designed to emit sounds of disruption. These were treated as the measures of a crank rather than those of justifiable concern. The stance taken by Ecuador has not shifted, despite claims by Morales that any recordings of Assange were done at the behest of the Ecuadorean secret service. Instead, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno has used the unconvincing argument that Assange, not Ecuador, posed the espionage threat. “It is unfortunate that, from our territory and with the permission of authorities of the previous government, facilities have been provided within the Ecuadorean embassy in London to interfere in the processes of other states.” The embassy, he argued, had been converted into a makeshift “centre for spying.”

German broadcasters NDR and WDR have also viewed documents discussing a boastful Morales keen to praise his employees for playing “in the first league…We are now working for the dark side.” The dark side, it transpires, were those “American friends,” members of the “US Secret Service” that Morales was more than happy to feed samples to. NDR has added its name to those filing charges against UC Global for allegations that its own journalists were spied upon in visiting the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

The allegations have the potential to furnish a case Assange’s lawyers are hoping to make: that attaining a fair trial in the United States should he be extradited to face 18 charges mostly relating to espionage would be nigh impossible. The link between UC Global, the US intelligence services, and the breach of attorney-client privilege, is the sort of heady mix bound to sabotage any quaint notions of due process. The publisher is well and truly damned.

Read more …

 

Simon Kuestenmacher: Map shows that #lightning follows shipping lanes: As it turns out particles in ship exhaust increase the likelihood and intensity of thunderstorms. Really cool fact that I had never considered! Source: https://buff.ly/2B0tcOV

 

 

 

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Jul 292018
 


Pablo Picasso The old guitarist 1903-4

 

What the GDP Report Won’t Tell You About the Economy (DDMB)
Julian Assange Looks For Deal To End ‘Diplomatic Isolation’ (CNN)
In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature (CJ)
Round the Bend (Jim Kunstler)
David Cameron’s Welfare Cuts Led Directly To The Brexit Vote (Ind.)
An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders: ‘No Bernie, It Wasn’t the Russians’ (MPN)
Putin Calls Christianity Foundation Of Russian State (AP)
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Star)
Nature’s Darkness-Creature Has Become Ours, Too (G.)
Migrant Arrivals Push Shelters To Breaking Point In Southern Spain (El Pais)
Number Of Fatalities In Greek Wildfires Rises To 88 (K.)

 

 

GDP may look strong, but sentiments are crumbling.

What the GDP Report Won’t Tell You About the Economy (DDMB)

Something is amiss in Corporate America. Both national and regional surveys reveal a sinking sense that the economy’s tailwinds are shifting to headwinds. The downtrodden confidence is a curiosity given many economists’ forecasts calling for second-quarter growth to have accelerated to a 4.2 percent annualized rate, the fastest since 2014. Soft though the survey data may be, the numbers don’t lie. If something doesn’t give – and fast – what follows is sure to be damaging to the real economy. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey for July revealed that the business outlook had slumped to the lowest level in over two years.

Odds are pretty good this number was dragged down by those with the highest incomes, many of whom are likely also business owners and corporate executives who’ve been on the front line of the rising costs to run their businesses. But there may be more than meets the eye among those whose incomes rank in the top third of households. While the majority of these respondents expressed concern over the tariffs, what they’re reading, hearing and seeing may be dampening their outlooks even further. As things stand, it’s as if January never happened, a month in which confidence was so high, the “news heard” among high income earners hit a 20-year high. By the beginning of July, “news heard” had slid to minus 18, the lowest in two years.

The six-month, 79-point swing is so severe it rivals August 2011, when the euro crisis shook world markets, Standard & Poor’s stripped the U.S. of its AAA credit rating and households were rattled by the debt ceiling debacle. [..] Consider the starting point for many companies. Last year’s weak dollar and natural disasters had many struggling to satisfy overseas demands and the massive needs required to rebuild. Labor and raw material costs were already on the rise to correct for the imbalances. The tariffs were the insult to injury many manufacturers could simply not afford.

“The actual economic impact will really come down to time,” cautioned Boockvar. “The longer this goes on, the more actual business activity will be negatively affected.” To Boockvar’s point, the collapse in business sentiment suggests many companies don’t foresee the ability to withstand further blows to their ability to profitably conduct business. Businesses are saying as much.

Read more …

Unbelievable garbage from CNN. That they pay attention to Assange now may be a ominous sign. They straight-faced claim that Assange fled rape allegations in Sweden. He did not. Sweden told him he was free to go to London. Only to turn around and issue a warrant for him.

Julian Assange Looks For Deal To End ‘Diplomatic Isolation’ (CNN)

Julian Assange walked into the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on June 19, 2012 to claim political asylum. He has been there ever since – a total of 2,230 days – rarely seeing daylight. But multiple sources say his situation is now untenable and he may soon leave, whether he wants to or not. The question is: what will happen to Assange as and when he does walk out of his bolt-hole around the corner from Harrods? The recent indictments issued by US Special Counsel Robert Mueller imply that Assange and WikiLeaks were a conduit for Russian intelligence in distributing hacked Democratic Party emails in 2016. According to the indictment document, “The conspirators (…) discussed the release of the stolen documents and the timing of those releases with Organisation 1 to heighten their impact.”

Assange has always maintained that he did not receive them from the Russian government. He told Fox News in January 2017: “Our source is not the Russian government, and it is not a state party.” A member of Assange’s legal team, Jennifer Robinson, told CNN this week: “WikiLeaks has made very clear they were not engaged in any way with the Russian state with respect to that publication. There is no connection between WikiLeaks and any of those who have been indicted.” His lawyers argue that all Assange did was publish the hacked emails, as did other media, after being in contact with a hacker called Guccifer 2.0. The Special Counsel alleges that Guccifer 2.0 was a cover for Russian intelligence, saying in the indictment that on July 14th [2016], Guccifer 2.0 sent WikiLeaks an encrypted attachment that contained “instructions on how to access an online archive of stolen DNC documents.”

Whether a sealed indictment awaits Assange in relation to the Russian hacking investigation is unknown. But according to US officials, charges have been drawn up relating to previous WikiLeaks disclosures of classified US documents. Assange would face arrest if/when he leaves the embassy because he skipped bail in 2012 – when Swedish authorities were seeking his extradition to face accusations of rape. Last year Sweden suspended the investigation, but Assange’s lawyers fear his arrest would be swiftly followed by a US extradition request. Assange maintains his innocence.

Read more …

This feels like too little too late. We know all this, we have for a long time. And it’s worse: as I wrote in May in I am Julian Assange, the Guardian engaged in an active smear campaign against Assange then. So does CNN -see above. That’s much more relevant than that they don’t defend him.

In Refusing To Defend Assange, Mainstream Media Exposes Its True Nature (CJ)

Last Tuesday a top lawyer for the New York Times named David McCraw warned a room full of judges that the prosecution of Julian Assange for WikiLeaks publications would set a very dangerous precedent which would end up hurting mainstream news media outlets like NYT, the Washington Post, and other outlets which publish secret government documents. “I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” McCraw said. “From that incident, from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.” Do you know where I read about this? Not in the New York Times.

“Curiously, as of this writing, McCraw’s words have found no mention in the Times itself,” activist Ray McGovern wrote for the alternative media outlet Consortium News. “In recent years, the newspaper has shown a marked proclivity to avoid printing anything that might risk its front row seat at the government trough.” So let’s unpack that a bit. It is now public knowledge that the Ecuadorian government is actively seeking to turn Assange over to be arrested by the British government. This was initially reported by RT, then independently confirmed by The Intercept, and is today full mainstream public knowledge being reported by mainstream outlets like CNN.

It is also public knowledge that Assange’s asylum was granted by the Ecuadorian government due to a feared attempt to extradite him to the United States and prosecute him for WikiLeaks publications. Everyone from President Donald Trump to Attorney General Jeff Sessions to now-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to ranking House Intelligence Committee member Adam Schiff to Democratic members of the US Senate have made public statements clearly indicating that there is a US government interest in getting Assange out of the shelter of political asylum and into prison.

Read more …

The state of the media is something to behold. Can it slide even further? You bet.

Round the Bend (Jim Kunstler)

Some people you just can’t reason with, especially the hell-spawned man-beast who personally directed Russian “meddling” and “interference” in our election and stole certain victory from president-designee Hillary. (I know this because The New York Times and The Washington Post said so.) Another astonishment: in his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the US would not recognize Crimea as part of Russia and would demand the return of the region to Ukraine. Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr. Pompeo is pissing up a rope on that one. Russia will not give up its warm-water naval bases on the Black Sea anymore than the US will return its San Diego naval installation to Mexico, and Mr. Pompeo knows it.

So do the posturing idiots on the senate committee, who apparently forgot that our own government officials fomented the 2014 Ukrainian coup that prompted Russia to annex Crimea and its military assets in the first place. How many of you feel a gnawing disgust and contempt for both sides of the US political spectrum? The news, day and night, reveals a nation unable to think, unable to discern reality from fantasy, avid to dissemble and lie about absolutely everything, eager to support any racketeering operation designed to fleece its own citizens, and utterly ignoring the genuine problems that can drive us into a new dark age.

On balance, and just for now, I’m more disturbed by the side represented by the Democratic Party, aka the “progressives” or “the Resistance,” because they are responsible for politicizing the FBI before, during, and after the 2016 election and that was a dastardly act of institutional debauchery in an agency with the power to destroy the lives and careers of American citizens. The product of that corruption is a dangerous manufactured hysteria inciting hostility and aggression against another nation that could lead to a war that humanity will not recover from.

Read more …

Austerity leads to right wing support everywhere.

David Cameron’s Welfare Cuts Led Directly To The Brexit Vote (Ind.)

As the Brexit negotiations roll on, we do see some signs of progress. Our understanding of the underlying causes of the referendum outcome has developed significantly in the last two years. Leave-supporting areas can be easily distinguished from those supporting Remain. Broadly speaking, they are more deprived, have lower levels of income, fewer high status-jobs, a weaker economic structure, and an ageing demographic with lower levels of educational attainment. Further, non-economic factors have also been highlighted as important correlates of support for Brexit . But an open question to economists, though, is what are the economic origins of the relationships between these characteristics and support for Leave?

An important cross-cutting observation that has been made over and over again is that Leave-supporting areas stand out in having an electorate that has been “left behind”, is particularly reliant on the welfare state and is thus exposed to welfare cuts. In a recent paper, I show that austerity-induced reforms, including widespread cuts to the welfare state since 2010, were an important factor behind the decision of many people to shift their political support to UKIP and, subsequently, support Leave in the EU referendum.

The austerity-induced reforms of the welfare state, implemented in the years after 2010, were broad and deep. In 2013, it was estimated that the measures included in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 would cost every working-age Briton, on average, around £400 per year. Crucially, the impact of the cuts was far from uniform across the UK: it varied from around £900 in Blackpool to just above £100 in the City of London. Aggregate figures suggest that overall government spending for welfare and protection contracted by 16 per cent in real per capita terms, reaching levels last seen in the early 2000s.

Read more …

What is Bernie thinking?

An Open Letter to Bernie Sanders: ‘No Bernie, It Wasn’t the Russians’ (MPN)

Let me preface this open letter of sorts that I’m writing to Senator Bernie Sanders. I’m not penning this missive as though I’m a crestfallen supporter, after falling for the okie doke in 2008 and waking up to the deception of Obama, I decided to stop putting my faith in politicians. Rather, I write this article on behalf of Bernie’s legions of supporters and the millions of Americans who put their faith in someone who spoke against the iniquities that are ravaging our nation and our planet as a whole. Bernie, it was your decision to speak against this consolidated graft that is cratering society that captured the imagination of the disaffected and gave people hope that their voices could be heard above the cash extortion that dominates our government.

Instead of continuing your rebellion against the establishment and speaking against the corrosive nature of our politics, you are charting a course towards irrelevance by jumping on this cockamamie #Russiagate narrative. Here is what I don’t get about your decision to glom on to this most ridiculous assertion that 12 Russians had more impact on our elections than the billions of dollars that are spent by corporations and plutocrats to bend elected officials like pretzels. The insinuation the punditry is making is that Americans were duped to vote against their own self-interests because they refused to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Never mind that Hillary was one of the most divisive and disliked politician to run for president in modern American history. Never mind that the DNC essentially rigged the primaries to ensure her victory at your expense. Instead of focusing on the structural and systematic flaws that render our votes irrelevant, fingers are pointed at a manufactured villain halfway around the world in order to distract from the fact that our elections have been hijacked by moneyed interests and entrenched leeches who are sucking the citizenry dry. Whatever efforts Russia might have made to influence our elections were outweighed by a kleptocracy that hacked down our democracy with dark money and self-centered politicians who put their interests above that of the people they purportedly serve.

Read more …

This one’s for you, bible belt.

Putin Calls Christianity Foundation Of Russian State (AP)

Vladimir Putin says that the adoption of Christianity more than 1,000 years in territory that later became Russia marked the starting point for forming Russia itself. Putin’s comments came Saturday in a ceremony marking the 1,030th anniversary of the adoption by Christianity by Prince Vladimir, the leader of Kievan Rus, a loose federation of Slavic tribes that preceded the Russian state. Speaking to a crowd of thousands of clergy and believers at a huge statue of the prince outside the Kremlin, Putin said adopting Christianity was “the starting point for the formation and development of Russian statehood, the true spiritual birth of our ancestors, the determination of their identity. Identity, the flowering of national culture and education.” The comments underline strong ties between the government and the Russian Orthodox Church.

Read more …

Book review. Hope the book itself is better. What social media do to people’s brains and social lives is far more relevant.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Star)

If you’re online these days, you likely sense that something’s wrong with the internet. You probably feel weird about how many times a day you check Facebook or Instagram, and likely a little uneasy about how annoyed or envious you feel when you do. Maybe the hostility online depresses you. Maybe you worry about the next generation, and how anxious they all seem. Maybe you’ve even considered deleting your accounts. This is exactly what Jaron Lanier, a leader in the tech world, says you should do. Right away. Lanier — a pioneer in the world of internet startups, and virtual reality in particular — has long been a critic of the Silicon Valley status quo. In this slim, highly-readable manifesto, he lays out his case against social media. And it is a devastating one.

In 10 simple arguments, the tech insider paints a picture of a wide-scale behaviour modification apparatus driven by social attention — both the carrot of approval and the stick of criticism, which generates the most intensity or “engagement.” “There is no evil genius seated in a cubicle in a social media company performing calculations and deciding that making people feel bad is more ‘engaging’ and therefore more profitable than making them feel good,” he writes. “Or at least, I’ve never met or heard of such a person. The prime directive to be engaging reinforces itself, and no one even notices that negative emotions are being amplified more than positive ones.”

According to Lanier, the social media apparatus has made people into lab rats, placing them under constant surveillance. He believes the process is making people angrier, more isolated, less empathetic, less informed about the world, and less able to support themselves financially. Add to all that: Lanier says this highly tuned behaviour modification system is for rent to anyone looking to influence the public. The constant stream of data, and the algorithms that tweak subsequent efforts to sway people, aren’t just used to sell soap, he notes, but to influence politics.

Read more …

Wonderful tale. But given the demise of insect numbers, bats must be under severe threat.

Nature’s Darkness-Creature Has Become Ours, Too (G.)

Here’s a flicker in the periphery. I notice it because of the way it moves; it’s a sort of fast fidget – staccato and angular in movement and path, like a movie projected at the wrong frame rate. It doesn’t swoop like a swallow, or bumble like a moth. The bat moves like a bat, and like nothing else. I’m sitting near my home under some trees, watching the coming night deepen the navy sky. The day has been airlessly hot, and with nightfall relief creeps into the air like a balm. Animals are out – I can hear twitches in the bushes behind me. Young frogs; hedgehogs maybe. Looking for water. Then I notice this bat. Seconds after I see it, I feel it pass so close that it makes my hair move, with it a split-second rustle of papery wings. I shiver.

Bats are just flying mice, people say, except they’re not, at all. Worldwide there are two main groups: Megachiroptera, big-eyed, placid-faced, small-eared – almost anthropomorphic, a man-bat; and Microchiroptera, the opposite. Nature’s darkness-creature has over time become ours, too. Their thorny outline is so conversant with the sinister that we nearly forget why. Light never catches them. They are opaque, darkly anonymous silhouettes into which humans project all manner of eerie ideas. Unwittingly, bats reinforce these with their habits. They haunt churches. Fly by night. Sleep subversively inverted. And the one far-flung species that feeds on blood bears the name “vampire” all too neatly.

This solitary bat flies about me in rapid loops. This one is maybe a noctule, or a pipistrelle. Catching insects perhaps. I worry that it will hit me but it won’t. It sees by echoing its sounds off nearby objects like aerial sonar, and it’s an excellent way to navigate. Those sounds are too high-pitched for the human ear to detect, and so to us, other than those wings, the bat makes no sound. None at all. I watch it. Bats need to catch air under their wings to fly. They can’t lift off like birds: they must drop. Their flight is a fall, arrested again and again with each frantic flap. That’s why they don’t move like anything else. Except, perhaps, a human trying to fly.

Read more …

And so the issue keeps shifting. But it doesn’t get resolved.

Migrant Arrivals Push Shelters To Breaking Point In Southern Spain (El Pais)

Shelters in the south of Spain are struggling to deal with a huge influx of migrants, many of whom are being left without a proper place to sleep. The arrivals – 1,300 in the past three days – have stretched services to their breaking point with the strain felt particularly hard in Algeciras as well as other municipalities along the coast of Andalusia. The number of undocumented migrants arriving in Spain has doubled since last year. Spain is now the main entry point into Europe, above Italy or Greece. But shelter services have been unable to keep up with the demand, leaving many migrants to sleep in overcrowded centers.

Up to 260 migrants spent the past two nights on the deck of a Maritime Rescue ship, more than 50 huddled together on a small courtyard of a police station in Algeciras, and 90 more jostled for a spot in the port of Barbate. Many more are left to wander the streets of towns like Medina Sidonia and Chiclana after spending the maximum legal 72-hour period in police custody. Immigration officials have traveled to Cádiz to look for a solution to what the Spanish government describes as a “collapse” of services. In a press release, the government said that 400 migrants had nowhere to go and blamed the problem on the former administration of Mariano Rajoy for its “lack of foresight.” “The number of arrivals has not stopped rising since 2017 but despite this nothing was done,” said a spokesperson for the Interior Ministry.

IN NUMBERS
• The number of people arriving by sea has tripled in the past year. Since the beginning of the year, 22,711 migrants have reached Spain, 19,586 by sea.
• Spain has overtaken Greece and Italy as the country which received the highest number of migrants.
• An average of 54 people arrived in Spain by sea each day in the first five months of 2018. That average has since shot up to 220 per day.
• Since the beginning of the year, 294 people have died trying to reach Spain – almost double the figure from the same period last year.

Read more …

Your donations are now also feeding the people in Mati, where conditions are really bad. I’ll have much more on the Automatic Earth for Athens Fund soon, many new and very positive developments, after a bit of a lull. More donations of course are needed and welcome.

Number Of Fatalities In Greek Wildfires Rises To 88 (K.)

A 42-year-old woman who was in intensive care after suffering extensive burns in the deadly wildfire that ripped through the coastal town of Mati in east Attica this week died early Saturday morning, raising the number of fatalities to 88. On Friday night, authorities also identified the bodies of the nine-year-old twin girls and their grandparents that went missing after the wildfires. Their bodies were among a group of victims recovered by emergency crews on Tuesday lying close together near the top of a cliff overlooking a beach. The news was reported on broadcaster SKAI by the private investigator the family had hired to find the children. It was confirmed by a reported friend of the family on his Facebook page.

The twins’ father had provided forensic authorities with a DNA sample and appeared on several TV stations seeking help in finding them. A total of 46 adult burn victims are being treated in hospitals in Athens, with nine of them in intensive care. Two children remain in hospital but authorities said their injuries are not life-threatening. Five days after the deadly blaze, there was still confusion over the number of those missing. The Athens Medical School’s Forensics and Toxicology Lab said it has conducted autopsies on 86 bodies, of which only 25 have been identified. As sources explained to Kathimerini, in the first 48 hours after the fires, several authorities wrote up lists of missing persons, which means the same people may have been recorded twice or more.

Since there was no official information on where relatives should report missing persons, police started separate investigations, when the relevant authority in this case would have been the fire service. On Saturday, Dimitra Lambarou, the deputy mayor of Marathonas, which has administrational jurisdiction over the majority of the devastated coastal town on Mati, said she is resigning over the deadly fires. “Since no-one else did it, I will,” she told broadcaster SKAI on Saturday. “I’m really ashamed for all those people who are in positions of responsibility,” she said and accused Marathonas mayor Ilias Psinakis of “not rising to the occasion.”

Read more …

Feb 212018
 
 February 21, 2018  Posted by at 8:06 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , ,  10 Responses »


J.J. Grandville ‘A Comet’s Journey’, Illustration from ‘Un Autre Monde’ 1844

 

Oxfam. I’m wondering if I should warn this is not for the faint of heart, or say don’t read on an empty stomach. If so, hereby. I know I found it hard.

The first and foremost thing the BBC last week felt its audience should know about the sleaziest scandal to come out of Britain in quite some time -and that’s saying something- is that an actress had turned her back on the aid organization. Your news in bite-size pre-chewed headlines.

While a guy who ‘served’ Oxfam in Bosnia claims it’s nobody’s business if he visited the local hookers in his spare time. The head office even specifically refuses to ban staff from doing that. Not violating a staff member’s civil liberties trumps a question like what drives desperate women -girls- into prostitution that same staff member pays for with money donated to aid desperate people.

Someone at the Dutch Oxfam/Novib office complained that his British colleagues should have provided more information, sooner, because now his branch suffers from the scandal (fewer donations). A branch that knew about it at least as far back as 2012, and passed on the info to the Dutch Foreign Ministry and Accounting Office. Who looked at potential -financial- damage in their country, found none, and located a carpet to sweep it under.

The only right choice for us, and our governments, would seem to be to cancel all donations to Oxfam, because apparently nobody connected to the organization is able to figure out who the actual victims are here. They instead portray themselves as the victims.

Of all people, its own chief executive feels a need, when responding to accusations of child sex abuse concerning his organization, to paint himself -and Oxfam- as victims. ‘Anything we say is being manipulated. We’ve been savaged’ . How does that guy hold on to that job?

Charities like Oxfam receive donations to help those people who have fallen victim to the conditions that exist where they live, be they manmade or due to natural disaster. Obviously, if Oxfam cannot (will not) even correctly identify these victims, it has no reason to exist.

Of course Oxfam announces more internal investigations when these accusations come out, but it’s too late. They’ve hush-hushed all previous such investigations, and there’s no reason to believe that won’t happen again. Oxfam has covered up the issues for a long time, likely decades, and if they can no longer cover things up -like now-, they try and make things look like incidents, stand-alone occurrences. This is a pattern.

 

Of course there are many people involved in international aid who are pure -enough- souls with the best intentions, but that’s simply not enough: sexual predation has infiltrated its ranks to such a degree, and management has refused to take the only appropriate steps against its perpetrators for so long, that sex abuse has become Oxfam’s middle name. And that very much includes child sex abuse.

I’ve been reading a lot about the story over the past 10 days, and one of the things that stand out is that the typical first reaction is to cover up whatever nastiness it is that surfaces, out of fear that donations would suffer. Instead of thinking about the people Oxfam is supposed to help, for which it receives those donations, and put their interests first. That is a death sentence for any aid organization. And rightly so.

It’s quite simple when you think about it: if we allow Oxfam to continue to exist, we accept that the aid we pay for through donations is sold to victims for sex. If you say, as many people do, that shutting down Oxfam will ‘only’ be bad for those in need who rely on it for aid, then that’s what you promote: aid for sex.

Through the many articles I’ve read I’ve seen people finger Oxfam for sex abuse in Haiti, Chad, South Sudan, Ivory Coast, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Nepal. Ten to one that is but a partial list. Other aid organizations cover even more territory. There are specific accusations, just through these articles, from 1999, 2004, 2012, 2015 and 2017. That too is but a partial list.

 

Let’s see if I can make a coherent story of all this without turning it into an entire book (would not be a problem). Here’s from The Independent, with a headline that takes us right where we need to be:

 

Oxfam Told Of Aid Workers Raping Children In Haiti A Decade Ago

Aid agencies including Oxfam were warned that aid workers were sexually abusing children in Haiti a decade ago, The Independent can reveal. Children as young as six were being coerced into sex in exchange for food and necessities, according to a damning report by Save the Children, which called for urgent action including the creation of a global watchdog. Its research exposed abuse linked to 23 humanitarian, peacekeeping and security organisations operating in Haiti, Ivory Coast and what was then Southern Sudan. “Our own fieldwork suggests that the scale of abuse is significant,” the report concluded.

“Every agency is at risk from this problem … existing efforts to keep children safe from sexual exploitation and abuse are inadequate.” It identified “every kind of child sexual abuse and exploitation imaginable”, including rape, prostitution, pornography, sexual slavery, assaults and trafficking. One 15-year-old girl in Haiti told how “humanitarian men” exposed themselves and offered her the equivalent of £2 to perform a sex act. “The men call to me in the streets and they ask me to go with them,” said another Haitian girl. “They do this will all of us young girls.”

A six-year-old girl described being sexually assaulted and a homeless girl was given a single US dollar by a “man who works for an NGO” before being raped and severely injured, while boys were also reportedly raped. When asked why the abuse was not reported, children said they feared losing aid, did not trust local authorities, did not know who to go to, felt powerless or feared stigma and retaliation. “The people who are raping us and the people in the office are the same people,” said one girl in Haiti.

Ironically, that report is from Save the Children. Ironic because just today the Telegraph had this:

The former chief executive of Save the Children resigned after he admitted making “unsuitable and thoughtless” comments to three young female members of staff, it emerged on Tuesday. Justin Forsyth, who is now deputy executive director at Unicef, “apologised unreservedly” to the women after sending them text messages commenting on how they looked and what they were wearing. Mr Forsyth’s resignation from Save the Children came just four months after Brendan Cox, a friend of Mr Forsyth and former chief strategist at the charity, quit following separate allegations of sexual misconduct.

Mr Forsyth and Mr Cox worked together at Oxfam and later again as advisors to Gordon Brown in Downing Street. Mr Cox, the widower of the late Jo Cox who was murdered in 2016, admitted at the weekend that he had caused the women “hurt and offence”. Neither Mr Forsyth nor Mr Cox were subject to a formal disciplinary hearing. Save the Children said on Tuesday night that trustees had carried out two internal investigations into the complaints against Mr Forsyth in 2011 and 2015.

Save the Children admitted on Tuesday that it dealt with 193 child protection and 35 sexual harassment cases last year, which led to 30 dismissals.

It’s by no means just Oxfam. But they’re a major player. In more ways than one, unfortunately. Oxfam has some 2,500 staff and 31,000 volunteers through the world. Its annual budget is about half a billion dollars.

Another ‘interesting’ pattern to emerge is that the perpetrators, even if they are penalized, seemingly seamlessly float between aid organizations: get kicked out in one place, start afresh a few months later at the next. This article from IRIN is about the Belgian guy with whom the latest scandal surfaced.

He lived in a splendid $2000 a month Oxfam-sponsored villa in Haiti right after the 2010 earthquake, when most locals didn’t even have a roof over their heads, and threw sex-parties there. None of that hurt him much; he lost his Oxfam job, though only after many years of complaints, but just kept going (and denies just about all):

The man at the centre of a sexual exploitation scandal at aid agency Oxfam was dismissed by another British NGO seven years earlier for similar misconduct, IRIN has found. A former colleague reveals that Roland van Hauwermeiren was sent home from his job in Liberia in 2004 after her complaints prompted an investigation into sex parties there with young local women. Despite this, van Hauwermeiren was recruited by Oxfam in Chad less than two years later and went on to work for them in Haiti, and then in Bangladesh for Action contre la Faim.

The Swedish government’s aid department, alerted in 2008, also missed an opportunity to bring his behaviour to light and even went ahead that year to fund Oxfam’s Chad project, under his management, to the tune of almost $750,000. [..] Seeing the Times article about van Hauwermeiren, Swedish civil servant and former aid worker Amira Malik Miller was shaken to read about the Haiti case, which pertained to alleged parties and orgies in 2011, seven years after her own experiences of him in Liberia. She couldn’t believe he was still active in the aid world, especially after she had blown the whistle on him and his colleagues, not once but twice.

“Oh my God, he’s been doing this for 14 years,” she remembers thinking. “He just goes around the system… from Liberia to Chad, to Haiti, to Bangladesh. Someone should have checked properly,” she told IRIN. On two previous occasions, she thought she had done enough to stop his predatory behaviour. Malik Miller told IRIN how her initial complaints way back in 2004 led to van Hauwermeiren being pushed out of his job as Liberia country director of UK charity Merlin, a medical group now merged with Save the Children. An internal investigation into sexual exploitation and misconduct led to his departure, several Merlin staff members confirmed.

And that was just for warming up. An interesting voice in the whole narrative is that of Australian professor Andrew MacLeod, who worked with the Red Cross in Bosnia and the UN Emergency Co-ordination Centre in Pakistan. From the Times:

 

UN Staff Responsible For 60,000 Rapes In A Decade

Andrew MacLeod, who was chief of operations at the UN’s Emergency Co-ordination Centre, said that “predatory” abusers used development jobs to get to vulnerable women and children. He estimated that 60,000 rapes had been carried out by UN staff in the past decade, with 3,300 paedophiles working in the organisation and its agencies. “There are tens of thousands of aid workers around the world with paedophile tendencies, but if you wear a Unicef T-shirt nobody will ask what you’re up to,” he told The Sun. “You have the impunity to do whatever you want. It is endemic across the aid industry across the world.”

More Andrew McLeod, via the Daily Mail:

I was first alerted to it in 1996 while working in former Yugoslavia with the International Committee of the Red Cross. People would talk about a nightclub called Florida 2000, in the Bosnian city of Zenica, where girls of 14 and 15 were working as prostitutes. These children were being trafficked into Bosnia from neighbouring Moldova by individuals working for the UN and Bosnian police. They were used exclusively for the sexual gratification of UN staff. Such lurid rumours seemed difficult to credit at first, but when a UN peacekeeper called Kathryn Bolkovac tried to investigate, she was swiftly demoted and then fired. Her story was turned into a film, Whistleblower, in 2010, starring Rachel Weisz.

There is so much opportunity for abuse and so little to stop it that jobs in international aid actively attract sexual predators who benefit from the artificial power the aid industry confers upon them. [..] Senior figures in the UN and some of our best known charities have known for decades that this problem was rampant. They should have put in place systems for training, prevention, protection and prosecution. By failing to do so they were committing an offence. They were party to child sex crime. They did nothing, and they should face charges. If they’re not worried – they should be.

From the same article:

A middle-aged man who persistently hangs around the gates of a British primary school as children are leaving will attract the wary attention of teachers, parents and, pretty soon, the police. But the same man lurking outside a school in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, will be quite safe. Especially if he is wearing a T-shirt bearing the logo of Unicef, Save the Children, Oxfam or any other internationally-renowed aid organisations. Almost 20 years ago, the UK’s National Criminal Intelligence Service, warned that due to better policing and safe-guarding strategies and an international crackdown on child sex tourism, predatory paedophiles were turning their attention to the developing world.

And the best way of gaining access to children? Work for a children’s charity in some place where paedophilia is ignored or difficult to police. Everyone working in the international aid industry needs to be aware of the scale of sexual abuse – happening on their watch and often involving their personnel – of vulnerable people, especially children. Those who deny it are either lying through their teeth, or have their heads buried so far in the sand that their ignorance is deliberate.

And if you think government investigations would solve anything, here’s how Britain’s Charity Commission deals with things:

The Charity Commission has been forced to defend its own investigations after Oxfam’s former head of safeguarding claimed she told the watchdog women were being coerced into sex for aid. Helen Evans said she was “extremely concerned” by the response to concerns she raised while heading the charity’s global efforts to protect staff and beneficiaries from 2012 to 2015.

While appealing for more resources from management to deal with a rising number of allegations, Ms Evans told how in a single day she was told of a woman being coerced into sex in exchange for aid, another aid worker having sex with a beneficiary and a member of staff being struck off for abuse. “There has been a lot of coverage about Oxfam and how shocking and surprising this is – it isn’t,” she told Channel 4 News.

“I went in 2015 to the Charity Commission, I went back again in 2017. Everything I’m saying today, the Charity Commission knew, so why is the Government saying this is a surprise?” Ms Evans had emailed Oxfam’s chief executive, Mark Goldring, warning that data being gathered from staff “increasingly points to a culture of sexual abuse within some Oxfam officers” but a face-to-face meeting was cancelled in 2014.

So far we’ve encountered Oxfam, Save the Children, Doctors without Borders (MSF) and the UN (including its children’s fund Unicef). But that’s by no means the whole story. Try this on for size from Agence France Presse:

Oxfam is not the first non-governmental organisation to be accused of abuse. Previous revelations spurred the United Nations in 2002 to issue special measures for all its staff and others, including aid workers under UN contract, based on a policy of zero tolerance. The issue came to public attention in 2002 after allegations of widespread abuse of refugee and internally displaced women and children by humanitarian workers and peacekeepers in West Africa.

In refugee camps in Guinea, Liberia, and to a lesser extent Sierra Leone, dozens of male aid workers, often locals, were suspected of having exchanged money or gifts for sex with young refugee girls aged between 13 and 18. “It’s difficult to escape the trap of those (NGO) people, they use the food as bait to get you to have sex with them,” an adolescent in Liberia was quoted as saying in a report from the UN refugee agency. More than 40 agencies and organisations and nearly 70 individuals were mentioned in the testimonies taken from 1,500 children and adults for the UN report [..]

It’s everywhere, the pedophile rot. And the cover-ups, the industry approach, the aid as big business. And that can only lead to ever more misery. Because aid should never become an industry.

I touched on that about a year ago in one of many articles on our efforts for refugees and homeless in Greece. When it comes to scrutiny of aid organizations, you shouldn’t expect much if anything from governments. They’re part of the same industry.

Politicians find it much easier to fork over their constituents’ cash to ‘recognized’ aid organizations than to investigate them. They have a vested interest in letting the system roll on without disturbing it.

 

The Automatic Earth Still Helps Greeks and Refugees

[..] NGOs, as I’ve written before, have become an industry in their own right, institutionalized even. As someone phrased it: we now have a humanitarian-industrial complex. Which in Greece has received hundreds of millions of euros and somehow can’t manage to take proper care of 60,000 desolate souls with that.

I’ve even been warned that if I speak out too clearly about this, they may come after Konstantinos and his people and make their work hard and/or impossible. This is after all an industry that is worth a lot of money. Aid is big business. And big business protects itself.

Still, if we’re genuinely interested in finding out how and why it is possible that hundreds of millions of taxpayer euros change hands, and people still die in the cold and live in subhuman conditions, we’re going to have to break through some of the barriers that the EU, Greece and the iNGOs have built around themselves.

If only because European -and also American- taxpayers have a right to know what has made this ongoing epic failure possible. And of course the first concern should be that the refugees have the right, encapsulated in international law, to decent and humane treatment, and are not getting anything even remotely resembling it. Refugees Deeply quotes ‘a senior aid official’ (they don’t say from what) anonymously saying that €70 out of every €100 in aid is wasted.

But the Oxfam scandal, spreading as it is across the entire aid’ industry’, is many times worse than letting refugees freeze on islands. Or is it? Isn’t it perhaps the exact same thing, that changes appearance between places but remains always the same in essence?

Oxfam must go. It’s been found painfully wanting for too long and on too many occasions. It’ll be a useful deterrent for all other groups. The managers of which, who often make hundreds of thousands of dollars if not more, must also go. They’ve all either known or should have known for many years. The buck stops with them.

The aid itself may stop too in some places, at some times, but when you can only hand out aid when you’re ready to accept that it will be traded for sex with often underaged children, you’re losing big time, and you’re never going to turn that around. Institutionalization can only be halted when walls are broken down, up to and including their foundations.

 

The aid organizations that cause all these problems have one thing in common: they’re large, large enough to become like, look like, industries. The ones that have expensive offices in A locations because that’s where their major donors are, and executives who make salaries like the executives at those donors.

That’s simply the wrong scale. In all the countries where these organizations operate, and where they bring their depraved sex-crazed staff, there are other, smaller, local organizations too. Who most often don’t have anything like those issues, who often exhibit the exact opposite behavior: people helping people without looking for anything in return. I know this from my experiences in Greece since 2015.

It’s when you scale up the humanity that exists in many, if not most, people, that things go awry and the vermin creeps in. When things become so large that managers are hired, you can be sure that most of the money donated for aid will be burned in a bonfire of politicians, businessmen and, as we now know, pedophiles.

Oxfam gets $500 million a year or so. The EU has pumped over €1 billion into Greece, and probably as much into Italy as well, to ‘solve’ the refugee situation. That Brussels doesn’t want to solve, and neither do Athens or Rome, for fear that it will encourage more refugees to come.

So they make the people they purport to help, miserable, and they put a huge price sticker on that misery posing as help, for the taxpayer to pay. Like this, for instance -from my same article above:

 

[..] every refugee who, before the EU-Turkey deal, passed through Greece on his/her way to Europe, cost the EU €800. For a family of 5 that adds up to €4,000, which would have been more than enough to pay for transport, stay at decent hotels and eat in normal restaurants for the duration of their trip (7-10 days). Suffice it to say, that was not what they got.

After the EU-Turkey deal made it impossible for refugees to leave Greece, €15,000 has been spent per capita. That is €75,000 per family of 5, more than enough to rent a villa on the beach, hire a butler and eat gourmet food for 8 months. Instead, the refugees are stuck in old abandoned factories with no facilities, in old tents in the freezing cold and in the rain, and forced to eat a dirt poor version of rice with chickpeas and lentil soup.

It won’t be easy to stop this insanity, but it can be done. Refuse to dole out money to organizations that have been accused of abuse. Refuse to give any organization more than $1 million. Support many small organizations insteads. Humanitarian aid does not scale up well. To say the least.

It’ll be cost-effective as well. It’ll take more effort to locate the right people, but given that $70 out of every $100 in donations is wasted by large aid organizations today, there’s a huge win lurking right there. You just need to find people who are better at all this than the ones who made that disaster possible.

Then, fire any manager who has not acted in the past on complaints. Establish a system that promises to put anyone in jail against whom credible complaints have been filed.

There are thousands of those walking around right now working for organizations funded by you and me directly, and by our taxes too, free to abuse another girl or little boy, and then another one tomorrow, or a mother who needs to feed her child(ren) because her home has been swept away by floods or bombs.

And make this the number one issue for the UN (yeah, I know, that same UN), to discuss and control as per tomorrow morning. Get multiple countries’ military to deliver what Oxfam did before, and make sure all soldiers understand what’ll happen to them at the first sign of abuse, of money, of people, anything at all.

There are many things out there that we can’t control, but this one we can. Because, as I said, in all locations where aid is needed, there are local people available to deliver it without trying to abuse, centralize, institutionalize it, profit from it, or turn it into a business. Just keep aid donations so small it’s not interesting to do any of those things.

At the UN level, I’m thinking Jimmy Carter. He’s the only man I can conjure up who has the integrity to clean up this mess. I know, one is a very small number. But Carter will know others. Big job, but doable. After all, we can’t very well have the worst of our own societies run rampant in places where people are defenseless against them.

Oh wait, that right there is another reason why our governments like the way things are going, just fine, isn’t it? Oxfam allows them (us) to export their perverts.

Well, screw that. We’re better than our governments.

To summarize: right now, your donation to Oxfam literally pays for pedophiles to go rape children across the world. Not every penny or dollar (they need their shiny offices too), but that’s not the point: your dollars keep the aid industry, the system, and therefore the opportunity for the abuse going. Is that what you want?

 

 

Aug 092016
 
 August 9, 2016  Posted by at 12:21 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Jodi Graphics 2014

Everyone gets 15 minutes of fame. Greece had its spot in the limelight last year. It is now no longer famous. We have all moved on to bigger dramas, or so we think. The French feel they are the victims because of terrorist attacks, the British because of Brexit, Americans because of Trump.

Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame line is as much about the average human being’s attention span as it is about anything else, like the proliferation of media. The data in the picture at the top of this article are from 2014. They are what moved Greeks to elect Syriza in early 2015. But the Greeks found out within 6 months that this made no difference; the Troika called the shots, not the Greek people, not its government.

Every single one of the numbers in that pic has gotten worse over the past two years since it was released, often by a lot. There are hundreds of thousands of Greeks who make anywhere from €100 to €500 a month working the only part time jobs they can find. 1.2 million workers must wait anywhere from 3-15 months for their salaries to be paid.

But they’re the lucky ones; at least they have jobs. There are millions who don’t make any money at all. 3 million Greeks have no health care coverage because of this. That’s 30% of the population. A related quote I first put up last year is: “..if you are sick in Greece now, you have an expiration date.”

The IMF report I wrote about recently in Why Should The IMF Care About Its Credibility? states unambiguously that the IMF itself, in cahoots with the EU, is to blame for all this misery. But we haven’t seen one single word that would indicate there are plans to rectify this gross injustice.

The austerity measures forced upon Greece by the EU and IMF squeeze the country itself, and the people who inhabit it, into ever growing desolation, with no way out at all on the horizon. A country and its economy cannot heal or recover when it has a 25% unemployment rate, and 50-60% for its young people. And has seen hundreds of thousands of its best educated people leave the country.

Moreover, with pensions, on which a large part of the overall population depends just to survive, having been cut for the umpteenth time (supplementary pensions were cut between 21% and 46% on August 1), while a wide range of taxes keep rising across the board, consumption is being strangulated, which leads to more companies and stores closing, more unemployment, rinse and repeat. You can find it in the dictionary under ‘vicious circle’. Or in the Greek one under ‘Schäuble’ or ‘Dijsselbloem’.

And then Angela Merkel had the gall not long ago to claim the EU had found the ‘right mixture’ of policies with regards to Greece. These people are so -willingly- blind, and they care so little about what their policies do to people, they couldn’t find a ‘right mixture’ if it drove over them in a truck.

Greece is being ritually slaughtered, and the Brexit referendum has not taught Brussels one single lesson. They’re not going to understand until it’s too late and the EU blows up, but that may still take some years, while for the Greeks it’s already too late now.

The Troika should really -certainly after the IMF report- be forced to repeal their ‘policies’ versus Greece, but who’s going to force them? They’re not accountable to anyone. Well, except for the IMF executive board, but they are just a bunch of …. And the other Troika side, the EU, is a lost case.

On top of the country’s internal problems, there are now 57,000 refugees stuck in Greece. 21,000 of them have requested asylum. Plans to relocate them through the EU have been miserable failures. Most of the refugees live in one of dozens of improvised camps in below-par conditions. Those who don’t have papers are often de facto prisoners.

More misery is on the way. The Troika has forced through a law that will make it much easier to foreclose on homeowners who can no longer pay their mortgages. It’s not hard to see that there are many of them. The country must therefore prepare for another epidemic of homelessness, a scary prospect for a society that’s already been hit so hard.

 

 

As you will know if you’re a regular reader of the Automatic Earth, I started the “Automatic Earth for Athens Fund” last spring when I first went to Greece to see what the Syriza ‘revolution’ would bring (we now all know what it brought). The donations from Automatic Earth readers into the fund went far beyond what I could have dreamed of.

After donating some of it to two volunteer clinics and am institute for streetchildren (see links to articles below), I decided to focus on donating the funds to O Allos Anthropos (which means The Other Human), a group of impoverished Greeks who feed other poor Greeks, and do so by cooking in the street. The movement is led by someone who has become a dear friend, Konstantinos (Kostas) Polychronopoulos.

 


Konstantinos (Kostas) Polychronopoulos

 

I have been back in Athens for a few months now, talked to Kostas quite a bit, and donated more of your money. So much so that there is nothing left. I paid the rent for the ‘nerve center’ in May (€2,054 per 3 months) and a total of €2,500 in May and June to repair Kostas’ car, without which the entire organization would grind to a halt. And then paid the rent again this Thursday, another €2,054.

My administration indicates that you have donated $24,370 to date, and I have given away $26,694. The numbers can’t be exact, because donations come in in USD, EUR and CAD, and exchange rates vary. Also, Paypal takes ‘its share’, which also varies. But one’s thing’s sure: the money’s been spent, and well spent. Actually, two things are sure, the second being that more money is needed.

 


Kostas was so happy to have his car running again, and you made that possible. It’s taken him ‘twice around the whole country’ in the past year. 13 different cities. It costs €500 to get a return ticket on the ferry to Lesbos with the car…

 

I am hesitant to ask the same people repeatedly to donate, but I will, because at this moment I have no choice. After I paid the rent two days ago Kostas told our friend and translator Tassos that he had two euros left in his pocket. And that’s not good. Of course I’ve known all along that the money could run out, but also that it won’t be for my lack of trying. And yes, this has become personal over the past year.

And now, not only will there be another wave of homelessness, other things deteriorate as well. A few weeks ago Kostas told me that donations of food, his by far most important kind of donations, are down by over 40%. People in Greece simply don’t have the money anymore to afford donations. While he has 13 ‘social kitchens’ running all over Greece which together prepare 3-5000 meals every day, and would like to do more, but can’t because he doesn’t have the means.

Another issue too has raised its head. Volunteer clinics like the ones I donated to a year ago are now coming to Kostas to see if he can get them medicine and various medical accessories. So he’s looking into that, with doctors to guide the process. There are people who donate unused medication, it’s starting up and the need there is great too.

Meanwhile, increasingly people come to O Allos Anthropos to be fed, who used to donate food themselves. Society is changing for the worse rapidly. The ‘nerve center’ I paid the rent for a few times allows some 100 homeless people every day to get a shower, have breakfast, do laundry, and have their children get help with schoolwork, often with pens and paper and books and schoolbags that are also donated.

According to Kostas, there are 155 NGOs operating in Greece. And while some undoubtedly do some good, it’s hard not to wonder what most of them do. Some of the issues with NGOs coming to Greece are obvious: for the big ones it’s their corporate structure, and for many it’s that they come from abroad and don’t know the culture. Though I don’t want to say anything negative about this, fact is there must be millions of euros flowing through this ‘industry’, and it’s hard to see where it‘s going.

It’s precisely because of such issues that I have chosen to support Kostas and O Allos Anthropos. They are Greek, they don’t make money from their involvement, so every penny goes towards those who need it most, and they are themselves as poor as those they help. And Kostas is the little engine that could who holds it all together, and holds everyone together.

 

 

Here is a video featuring Kostas from 2 years ago. What struck me when seeing it again is that he’s proud of going from handing out 20 to 200 meals per day. Since then, he’s gone to 5000 per day. And yes, I also do get the irony in the role that your donations to the Automatic Earth for Athens fund have played in making that development possible. I would deeply regret having to bow out now, and leave Kostas to himself. Not that he wouldn’t make it, but we, you and me, have made a big difference. But I can’t do it alone, it has to be as much of a community effort as O Allos Anthropos itself is. So please help.

 

 

 

I’ll get back to you about this soon. I’ve been breaking my head trying to figure out how to collect more funds to continue supporting O Allos Anthropos, lying awake at night over it. Yeah, we could turn to crowdfunding perhaps, but I think it’s important that it would have to be done right, and this is not my expertise.

Kostas is a bit of a difficult ‘customer’ to work with, but for good reasons in my eyes. He doesn’t want the group to become an official organization, he doesn’t want to become an NGO, and he doesn’t want to apply for government support. Because all these things would lead away from what he thinks is essential: people helping people.

He refused an award from the EU last year saying ‘you guys are responsible for this mess and this misery, I want nothing from you’. ‘Official’ support comes with conditions, with people wanting to tell you what to do and how to do it. But yes, it makes it harder to keep things afloat, and to help where help is needed.

Kostas has many ideas for how he would like to change and expand his operations, but for now just holding on to the basics is a battle. He was talking the other day about villages in the mountains where mostly older people live, isolated and in dire need of food and medication, of how he would like to set up a way to reach out to them.

I’ll leave this here for now. If anyone has ideas about for instance a crowdfunding campaign, please contact me at contact •at• TheAutomaticEarth •dot• com. For anyone in the medical profession, if you have ideas about how to get medication here from abroad, please let me know. There is a great need for insulin, various cancer drugs are not available in the country at all anymore, and then there are things like blood pressure tests, blood sugar tests, hearing aids and wheelchairs.

I’ll get a full list from one of the hospitals soon. Everything medical will run through them too.

 

 

For donations to Kostas and O Allos Anthropos, the Automatic Earth has a Paypal widget on our front page, top left hand corner. On our Sales and Donations page, there is an address to send money orders and checks if you don’t like Paypal. Our Bitcoin address is 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

To tell donations for Kostas apart from those for the Automatic Earth (which badly needs them too!), any amounts that come in ending in either $0.99 or $0.37 (don’t ask), will go to ‘The Other Human’.

Please give generously.

 

 

I made a list of the articles I wrote so far about Konstantinos and Athens. Not sure if it’s complete.

June 16 2015

The Automatic Earth Moves To Athens

June 19 2015

Update: Automatic Earth for Athens Fund

June 25 2015

Off to Greece, and an Update on our Athens Fund

July 8 2015

Automatic Earth Fund for Athens Makes First Donation

July 11 2015

AE for Athens Fund 2nd Donation: The Man Who Cooks In The Street

July 22 2015

AE Fund for Athens: Update no. 3: Peristeri

Nov 24 2015

The Automatic Earth -Finally- Returns To Athens

Dec 25 2015

Help the Automatic Earth Help the Poorest Greeks and Refugees

Feb 1 2016

The Automatic Earth is Back in Athens, Again

Mar 2 2016

The Automatic Earth for Athens Fund Feeds Refugees (Too)

 

 

 

 

May 092016
 
 May 9, 2016  Posted by at 6:52 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  15 Responses »


NPC “Melvin Jones, 5, who pierced heart with scissors” Washington DC 1925

Well, I guess I’m going to have to write this some time, even if I don’t really like to. Here goes. I haven’t written an original article in 8 weeks or so now, and there’s a reason for that. That is, two days after I flew from Athens to Amsterdam mid-March, I got myself a -for lack of a better term- nasty injury. And I have no idea where it came from. Crampy seat on the plane? There’s a link to earlier hip issues, I know that, but this was (is) severe.

What happened was the IT (ilio-tibial) band in my left leg (ligament on outside of thigh, runs down from hip to shin/ankle) seized up pretty much entirely; muscle contraction squared -or cubed-. All of a sudden, I couldn’t stand up straight any longer, nor could I walk other than in a hunched Quasimodo way and just for a few feet, and because when muscles contract in this fashion they get extremely painful, 24/7, lying down hurt a lot too, and I therefore basically didn’t sleep for weeks, other than occasional bouts of 1 hour and change brought on by utter exhaustion, and from which excruciating pain would wake me. I must have lost 150 hours of sleep in the first month, easily.

At times I was thinking that this was hell, but hey, I had a room to be in that was mine, a couch to site or lie down on, and I could have my groceries delivered and pay for them. As you will know if you’ve read me over the past year, I met a lot of people who don’t have these things. And who despite that, or maybe because of that -who knows, really- work their behinds off every day to make sure other people are taken of. More about that in a bit.

The family doctor had no idea what pain I was talking about and prescribed a useless generic painkiller (Dyclofenac). I then, 3 weeks in, focused on a treatment that my friend Steve Keen, the famed Australian economist and another fitness buff, had been talking about when we met earlier this year in Athens and had dinner with Yanis Varoufakis: myo-fascial release. And I found a physio practice that advertized it.

Then it took these people, in turn, over a week to figure out that the manual massage part of this treatment was of no use, but after that they started to do what I came looking for: dry needling, meant to ‘blow up’ the trigger points in the muscle. That helps. So yes, economists ARE good for something.

I can walk now, though it’s all far from perfect, and it’ll take more treatment. I can walk short distances but that’s it and I’m still exhausted most of the day and need to sleep a few hours in the afternoon. It’ll take treatment, and it’ll take time too.

All in all, that’s what kept me from writing. You can’t do that, or I can’t, when constantly in pain and/or fatigued. It kills the focus. I haven’t missed one day of doing a Debt Rattle news overview, but that was all I could do and had the energy for.

Next thing is, I promised to be back in Athens later this week, and I intend to go; the rent for our friend Konstantinos (Kostas) Polychronopoulos’ Social Kitchen nerve center is due the 15th, and I said I’d pay that with your Automatic Earth for Athens Fund donations -like I did in February-. I could perhaps have found another way to arrange for it to be paid, but the timing feels good now.

Because we need to figure out where we’re going with this, with the involvement of The Automatic Earth and its readers. To be specific: the first AE for Athens Fund I started about a year ago, when things were so hugely different from what they are now, and from which I expected to get just a few hundred dollars, today adds up -this is all in euros, worth $1.14 today- to €10,204. Since I donated €5,000 of that, €5,204 remains.

The second fund, started in December specifically for Kostas’ Social Kitchen when I saw how overwhelmed they had become with the refugee flows on top of their aim to feed Greece’s poor, is at €11,539. I gave Kostas €9,550 of that to date, so it’ll all be gone with the €2054 in rent for May, June, July that will be paid this week.

Converted -back- to US dollars, the currency 97% or so of Automatic Earth donations use, that means you crazy folk donated over $25,000 for Greece in a year’s time. Once again, I would never have expected to. And I’m very grateful, as is Kostas, and as are the large groups of volunteers he works with, and the people we all feed.

So, you know, the question is: what are we going to do from here on in? I will of course ask you to donate more, we are one-on-one feeding people here who go hungry otherwise. And looking after them in other ways. It doesn’t get much more direct than that.

But I realize you are not an endless source of funds. So, given how much you’re already given, and given the increase in need that exists in Greece, we’d have to find another, a wider approach. And to be honest, I don’t know what that should be, or what it would look like.

You see, a year ago, before the main refugee stream came knocking, there was very little involvement of NGOs in the country. Not on the islands, and not in Athens or Saloniki. That has changed beyond recognition since. And it’s the NGOs that are well-funded with western taxpayer money and -donations, so once they come in, they flex their muscles. Often not a great development.

They think they know what to do, while first talking with locals like Kostas would make sure their funds are spent much more efficiently. An example I mentioned before is an NGO that ‘peddled’ meals on Lesbos (Mytilini) late last year for which they received €7 from headquarters, while Kostas makes meals for 50 cents.

But I don’t want to delve into negative things, had plenty of that lately. You can still donate money to the Social Kitchen, which prepares some 10,000 meals a day (!), by using the Paypal widget in the top left corner of TheAutomaticEarth.com, and donating a number that ends in either $0.99 or $0.37. Not a penny will not go to helping those who need it most. The Social Kitchen is run entirely by volunteers, nobody gets paid for the work.

You can also of course always donate to The Automatic Earth itself, which needs to remain funded too, or none of these activities would be possible.

So you’re up to date, I have screwed up the guts to negotiate an airport, and we’ll talk again once I get to Athens. And we’ll take it from there.

The EU may still dump Greece, though that won’t happen until July when it has a huge debt to pay to the ECB and the Brexit referendum is conveniently in the past, but Erdogan and Turkey can go full-tard bonkers at any moment in time and drop more refugees on Greece than ever before.

Summer is coming.

Feb 012016
 
 February 1, 2016  Posted by at 8:21 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Konstantinos Polychronopoulos 2016

Time does indeed fly; I’ve already been back in Athens for a week, but I still haven’t told you about it -a nasty flu now in its 4th day is a partial excuse-, and also haven’t even written the story of my last trip in Nov-Dec. Don’t think it’s Zika, though that’s a weird story; from what I gather someone was testing a GMO fly back in the Caribbean that caused this mutation and now someone wants to fight it with another GMO fly?! Ain’t we smart.

Anyway, the stunning generosity of the Automatic Earth readers left me no choice but to visit the city again so soon, really. Which is I think a really good thing.

I wrote an article on December 22 2015, An Urgent Christmas Call To The Finance Blogosphere. There has been close to no reaction from rest of that blogosphere, to my -just a tad disgruntled- surprise, but a lot from our own readers.

In the article, I made an appeal for help for the work of my new best friend Kostas (Konstantinos Polychronopoulos), who has devoted his entire life to helping the poor and homeless of Athens (an ever faster ever growing group of people), starting with providing at least a decent meal. I first talked about Kostas’ work in July just after I first met him in AE for Athens Fund 2nd Donation: The Man Who Cooks In The Street.

In that follow-up, An Urgent Christmas Call To The Finance Blogosphere, I said:

I was saying before how ‘The Other Human’ [O Allas Anthropos] social kitchen had grown at least 5-fold. That is a bit of an understatement. There are now 5 different ‘kitchen teams’ running (vs 1-2 before), and they hand out over 3000 meals a day today instead of the 300 earlier in the year. There simply is that much need. The Greeks themselves are getting poorer, fast, and refugees have become a major ‘target’ group as well. Kostas began running operations on Lesbos over the summer, and has a team in place there now as well as on Salimani island and 3 different locations in the Athens area. And there’s no doubt he would like to do more.

Before, costs would be covered by food donations and sympathizers giving €5 or €10 a month from what little they have. Between pensions cuts, pay cuts and capital controls, the number of Greeks who have next to nothing rises fast. It’s no exception for former supporters to now come to rely on Kostas for their own food. Nor is it exceptional for grandmothers to still insist on giving $5 from the €400 that’s all that’s left of their pension. Greeks do solidarity well.

But the numbers are getting out of hand, so many people need help, and it promises to get much worse in 2016, looking at the new austerity measures the troika is forcing upon the country, and the expected numbers of refugees arriving. The donations that used to run ‘The Other Human’ are simply not enough to cover operations any longer, let alone expand them where most needed.

And while the €1000 I donated earlier this year went a -relatively- long way, the second €1000, though at least as much appreciated, won’t go nearly as far. When I was told ‘The Other Human’ have been forced to cancel some cooking events now -for the cold and hungry homeless, for crying out loud, who are increasingly people that used to have jobs and homes and all until recently-, simply because they can’t afford to feed the poor, that actually hurt, and stung. That felt personal.

Turns out, since then, more has been added (‘the need is so great’). As per a quite hilarious email from Kostas 10 days ago, when I hadn’t arrived in Greece yet:

My friend Raul; By Wednesday I am here and the kitchen of lesbian, hope to see a third or fourth. Tells other people that the social kitchen has grown, we speak has seven and prepared in other two cities in Greece.

Yeah, that made me laugh. Still don’t know if he intended that ‘lesbian kitchen’ thing. He did seem to find it awfully funny when I remarked on it, though, in person the other day. On a more serious note, what he’s saying is that in the past month, he went from 5 to 7 social kitchens, and is adding 2 more. Or trying to.

‘That Wednesday’ was 5 days ago. We had a meeting then with a few people to coordinate how we’re going to make the entire situation as clear and transparent as we can to you, Automatic Earth readers, who’ve already donated over another $8000 (!) -it’s truly stunning- since December 22 (on top of the first AE for Athens fund I started in spring 2015, for which $12,000 came in and which has $7000 left in it).

Allow me to repeat: I never had the slightest idea, I thought I’d get a few hundred bucks when I first brought this up, in spring 2015, even before I met Kostas, and that’d be it. It’s more humbling than I can put into words to have you trust me with so much. There’s not an inch of me that isn’t constantly aware of that.

Those kind of amounts take it from being something nice, to being a serious responsibility, in my view. And Kostas agrees completely. So this Wednesday we’re going to have a big gathering with lots of the people who work for ‘The Social Kitchen’, in the various locations the organization operates in, have a big get-together, take lots of pictures, hopefully have a party -which all the volunteers truly deserve-, and exchange more detailed information.

Moreover, we’re going to -try to- spell out exactly -up to a point- what your money is being spent on. And, of course, talk about what we can do to increase the funding, and -especially- how to make it more structural -once every week, month or year-. I realize full well that there is a limit to what the Automatic Earth and its readers can do, but I guess we’re simply going to keep pushing with what we have, and see where it ends.

I don’t know enough about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing and the like to get that up and going with enough confidence in either the outcome or the process itself -but I’m very open to suggestions-, and I apparently don’t know enough about how to get the rest of the finance blogosphere going either. What a shame, there’s so much money on the one side, and so much need on the other. But that doesn’t mean I intend to stop pushing.

More on Kostas and O Allas Anthropos later this week. There are a few other things I would like to share with you. First, something I noticed last month in supermarkets here -the ones I see in the center are not all that big-, that flashed a big red sign and made me think of Eastern European stores I’ve seen.

Troika-imposed austerity and taxes have had a double whammy impact. People have much less to spend on basic needs, and what is still available has become expensive, even in western European terms. So what you get is a lot of empty shelves:

I’ve seen stores where I swear I saw half the employees being busy making those shelves look less empty by spreading what is still for sale, across the empty spaces. At least these people still have a job, though I must wonder what they pay.

Those are pictures I took in December, of something I don’t remember seeing in June/July on my first trip here. I was in a large Carrefour -major French chain- supermarket where I didn’t take pictures, and it was even more evident there. Empty shelves. Near to the center of a large city in the western world.

Then, there’s another organization that I need to tell you about, since I donated $1000 of your money to it, from the AE fund for Athens that I started with last spring.

I was introduced by a friend to Myrto Lemos, a woman who started doing field work in New York City in the late 1970s (she must be in her 70s now). Upon her return to Athens in the 1980s, she began working with -‘socially excluded’- street children in central Athens’ poorest areas, specifically those from Greek muslim and Roma backgrounds. In 1997, she established the Support Center for Children and Families for them. It is run -as so many things are in Greece these days- entirely by volunteers.

Here’s Myrto with Kostas, I didn’t know they knew each other, and neither did the people who introduced me to her, but turned out they did:

The children Myrto has devoted her whole life to -I have so much admiration for people with that dedication- would typically sell flowers, balloons and trinkets on the street all day every day (for generations, basically), there was never a culture of going to school or anything like that. Myrto decided it was time to change that.

And she did. The best example, I found, was a young girl who now works as a social worker at the Support Center, but who had never even been to school before the age of 12, who couldn’t read or write, nothing. And now there she is on the left answering the phone, a fully educated social worker (imagine how proud Myrto is):

The Center provides food (a big thing) and education for the children, makes sure they go to school, and gives -badly needed- social and legal help to their families (where no-one can read or write). I’ve got to say, to me, this was an entirely unexpected corner of society, and the needs existing within it.

But Athens, and Greece in general, have of course been on a crossroads of cultures and societies for thousands of years, so it should be no surprise to find parts of them anchored -left behind?!- inside the city, albeit largely forgotten.

Greece is known as one of the best educated countries on the planet – though that can’t possible have improved over the past 5-10 austerity years-, and then you still find entire cultures that never went to school. Ironically, it’s the austerity policies that force more of these kids back out into the streets peddling their trinkets and not attending school, just so their families can eat. A major issue and worry for Myrto, who wants them at school.

Here’s the pretty much nondescript building the Center is housed in at the corner of Aristonos 6-8 & Pierias, Kolonos:

Plus, the lovely grand map of the world that covers an entire wall in one of the homework rooms, with divers and dolphins and kangaroos and elephants and turtles and whales and hidden treasures, what a great way to learn about the world you live in, when no-one ever told you:

And the inevitable lovely adorable far too cute and far too smart little girl doing her homework, who, lest we forget, if not for Myrto would probably have been peddling balloons on the streets -or worse- without ever having learned to read or write, for the rest of her life. Now, she has a shot at being a person, a woman in her own right.

It’s an honor and a privilege to be able to meet these people, and be able to do something very useful for them, thanks to you, Automatic Earth readers.

I see so much passing by each and every day in the financial press about allegedly successful people, and what makes them successful, and it’s always about the amount of money they make or have made.

But for me, success is defined by what a person does for others, it’s about helping people, not helping yourself. And I, through a twist of fate I had never planned or even imagined, get to meet these people here in a pretty much derelict society, where not much runs any longer as it once did, and where worse is on the horizon.

And that’s where you get to see who people really are, where you find people who say: ‘it’s not about me’. In the world of finance, it’s always only about ‘me’, and about money, and the seemingly unbreakable umbilical cord between the two.

Do you think the markets are going to rise? Here’s how to make money. Do you think they will fall? Here’s how to make money off of that. It’s all only about me and my money, but it’s a life that’s barely even breathing, and barely moving at that, a bunch of automatons thinking they prove their smarts if they pick the ‘right’ swing of a one-dimensional pendulum.

If that’s all people are about, and what you and I are about, why bother? Just so maybe one day we can sit our asses down at a pool in the Caribbean and say ‘we got it made’, while millions of others elsewhere in the world grovel in the dirt and wind up burying the children they love, in that same dirt?

It’s the quintessential difference between what you have and what you are. And about who has sufficient faith in what they are, and doesn’t feel the need to hide behind what they have. Who doesn’t think that if the whip comes down and the whole debt circus tent gets blown away in a wicked storm, they’ll still be fine if only they bought enough gold or bitcoin or whatever in advance.

But that’s a hard nut to crack in today’s world. So we’ll instead let it seep in drop by drop. Same difference. Though that’ll still be denied too.

If in the meantime, sorry but my cold won’t let me do much of anything right now, you want to contribute to the Social Kitchen project, the way to do it is still through the Automatic Earth‘s Paypal widget, top left hand corner of every page. Amounts ending in $0.99 or $0.37 go towards the Social Kitchen, others towards supporting the Automatic Earth (which is also highly needed, and without which we couldn’t do the whole thing, regardless.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find myself a hole to reside in until my cold is over. And I’ll be back with more on this later in the week.

Nov 242015
 
 November 24, 2015  Posted by at 7:52 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  1 Response »


Kostas Tzioumakas Constantinos Polychronopoulos 2015

That’s right, I am at last able to come back to Athens, starting today. Alas, without Nicole Foss, who was supposed to join me in the city earlier this year but is back in New Zealand now. Why that plan never materialized, and why I couldn’t return myself, is all about the illness and subsequent passing of my mother, a process I write about in Eulogy for Johanna.

And there are still too many things to do to mention here in Holland, but I don’t feel good sitting on money that our readers have donated for Greece in our Automatic Earth for Athens fund. So that has to be a priority now, in my view. Your generosity, beyond my wildest dreams, combined with my caution in spending that generosity and my ignorance of the inner workings of the city, have resulted in an open ledger of over $8000 (!) US that will have to find its way to the proper goals.

First, you can (re)read my earlier exploits in a series of articles I wrote on the topic this year:

The Automatic Earth Moves To Athens (June 16)

Update: Automatic Earth for Athens Fund (June 19)

Off to Greece, and an Update on our Athens Fund (June 25)

Automatic Earth Fund for Athens Makes First Donation (July 8)

• AE for Athens Fund 2nd Donation: The Man Who Cooks In The Street (July 11)

• AE Fund for Athens: Update no. 3: Peristeri (July 22)

Then, as I’m thinking about this, the first thing that strikes me is the extent to, and the way in, which the Athens problems seem to have changed and switched. In late June and early July, there were refugees, but the main issue was the Greeks themselves. Varoufakis was still finance minister, and the idea was still alive that Greece would stand up to the Troika.

There was hope and excitement in the air, even though the banks were forced shut. There was the big OXI vote early July. But it all went downhill from there, Yanis left, Tsipras gave in to Schäuble, but most of all the refugee numbers on for instance Lesvos went from 200 a day to 5-6-7000 a day. It feels like a 180º change. But then again, it’s not really.

The Greek population is still -and things keep getting worse each day- being dragged down by the EU ordered policies, which are certain to kill off the entire economy. If people have nothing left to spend, nobody can sell them anything either, so unemployment just gets worse. There are tons of Greeks who still have jobs, and they’re the lucky ones, but who’ve seen their pay cut by 25%, 50%. Nothing out of the ordinary.

To wit: Greek rental prices are down 40%, but 40% of the population can’t even afford those prices anymore. The economy simply gets squeezed more and more, and every day sees its chances of recuperating diminish. Asphyxiation by decree.

The Cameron government is doing the exact same thing to Britain at the moment, even if, unlike Greece, the pretense is that the economy is doing well there. It’ll be a spectacle to watch. Once you start killing off your care systems, you get what I saw in Athens – and will again. And I’m not at all sure that the Brits can do what the Greeks can when it comes to humanity and solidarity.

It’s still those same strangled yet amazing Greeks who will go out of their way to help the refugees, who increasingly threaten to flood the country as one razor wire fence after another is erected on the Balkans. There’s a serious risk this winter of refugees, and their children in particular, freezing and/or contracting severe illnesses while getting stuck on the country’s northern borders.

And the EU keeps doing what it does best: make things worse. Why even Varoufakis keeps defending the EU, and just thinks it should be ‘reformed’ and democratized’, I can’t fathom. The EU’s problems are not ones of degree, but of substance, of its very make-up.

With France having thrown out any allegiance to the EU Stability Pact budget deals, and borders being closed all over the place, either with razor wire or with soldiers, the very ideas and ideals that are the foundation of the Union are fast eroding already. And what legitimacy will be left for the Brussels apparatus is entirely up in the air.

But okay, Athens first. There must be an overwhelming number of people and causes that I can help with your money. It’ll just be a matter of finding the most needy and deserving. In June/July I donated €1000 euros each to two volunteer clinics, in Piraeus and Peristeri, and to the man you see pictured above, Kostas Polychronopoulos, aka ‘the man who cooks in the street’.

I know through the grapevine that Kostas has been very active feeding refugees on Lesvos, and I’ll be sure to try and find him, wherever he may be, see how he sees the situation. My idea is I’ll play it by ear, I’m for instance not sure Lesvos needs my presence too, and besides you donated the money for the Greeks, but I’ll certainly listen to the people on the ground.

You can of course still donate to the Automatic Earth for Athens Fund, by all means I beg you, your money will find a good place, I’ll guarantee that. Here’s, once again, how I put it at the very beginning:

Now, I don’t think I can go to Athens and not try to see if there’s something I can do to alleviate some of the misery in my own small way. But since that way would be extremely small given where the Automatic Earth’s financial situation and funding stand at the moment, I thought of something.

I’m hereby setting up an “Automatic Earth for Athens” fund (big word), and I’m asking you, our readership, to donate to that fund. I will make sure the revenues will go to clinics and food banks, to the worthiest causes I can find. To not mix up donations for Athens with those for the Automatic Earth, which are also badly needed, I suggest I take any donation that ends with 99 cents, as in $25.99, and single those out for Greece. Does that sound reasonable? Let me know if it doesn’t, please.

You can also donate bitcoin at this address: 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

I’ll be back tomorrow from Athens.

Jul 222015
 
 July 22, 2015  Posted by at 8:49 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Ilargi The Other Human crew, Monastoraki Square, Athens July 2015

I owe you all a major update on the AE for Athens Fund, and perhaps an apology for this taking so long. It’s been over a week since I made the latest donation, and I even left Greece 6 days ago already. As I noted before, I will have to go back, and take Nicole with me, and I’m planning to do that soon, in August. It’s just that because of my mother’s condition, here in Holland, it’s sort of in limbo when exactly that’s going to happen.

I have gotten a much better overview of where to donate your money during my three week stay, so hopefully we can move a bit faster next time around. I guess it’s always a toss up between doing these things fast and doing them properly. I would always pick the latter, giving away your money is a large responsibility. It simply takes time.

I have donated €3000 so far, €1000 each to two Solidarity clinics, and $1000 to Constantinos (Kostas) Polychronopoulos, who I wrote about in AE for Athens Fund 2nd Donation: The Man Who Cooks In The Street. I went back to see Kostas and gave him another €500. Can’t think of anyone less selfish and more deserving of support.

Here’s Kostas’ crew in Monastiraki square with the food to be handed out. He didn’t arrive till later, he had a meeting at the Health Ministry. Probably a good thing, they recognize what he does. Still, as I said before, he wants no government or NGO involvement.

Most of these people are homeless, the others are supporters in one way or another. They’re all remarkably nice and gentle. They’re an amazing crew that Kostas gathered around him, and gave a sense of belonging.

That same day, I donated €1000 to a second clinic, much more on that below. A third clinic didn’t happen because of a general strike and riots. But they’re the first when I return. We now also have a more or less comprehensive list of solidarity clinics, that’ll make things easier. Just need to find the most needy ones; some are already well funded.

At the second clinic, in Peristeri, Dimitri and I were told, by everyone in one voice, when we asked where the greatest needs were: insulin. For some reason the clinic has a hard time even importing it, and there are many diabetics. We’re trying to find out why what the issue is, and if perhaps we can bring some from Holland, either in our bags or by FedEx. Finding those things out, too, takes time.

But still … all in all, I managed to donate “only” €3000 so far. I would have signed up for that in a heartbeat a month ago, but not anymore. Because the total for the AE for Athens Fund today stands at an bewildering $11,681.95(!!!). That’s American dollars. I converted what came in in euros and Canadian dollars on the day itself, so with the rising USD we actually won a bit more there lately.

If we put the euro at $1.11 (it’s even less now), I still have over €7000 left to donate. And no, that doesn’t mean I think you should stop donating. Quite the contrary. I did mention before that all the money will be donated, right? That our flights and expenses will not come out of the Fund. Just wanted to make that clear again.

Even if the government seems to have surrendered for now to the Troika, and there’s money being exchanged from the ECB, through Athens, and then straight back to the ECB and IMF, the Greek people won’t see a penny of it.

The lack of solidarity that the rest of Europe have shown with Greece is quite stunning, really. That the big shots have no perception of compassion is one thing, it’s what selects them to be big shots, but that the people themselves don’t either, is quite another.

The solidarity clinics and “men who cook in the streets” will be needed in Greece for a long time, no matter what happens. A society gutted to the bone over a 5-year period takes a long time to rebuild, and that’s presuming any such efforts will be made to begin with. Raising VAT on basic necessities paints a dark future.

And we may not be able to solve the problem, but we can certainly alleviate some of it. All it takes is to go to the right places. And that’s what I intend to continue doing.

We have a bunch of clinics lined up, and I want to do something for children in need, and for the refugee problem. Even if the latter is fast becoming such an overwhelming issue it will take billions of euros, not the thousands you guys entrusted me with.

When I look at that, at how thousands of people are being left stranded daily somewhere in bankrupt Greece, I’m thinking there’s little doubt that Europe as a whole is financially bankrupt, but I care much less about that than that it’s morally bankrupt. Of which the condition of the Greek people themselves is evidence enough by itself, of course.

Please make sure donations keep coming in. Here’s how, through a quote from a number of weeks ago:

I don’t think I can go to Athens and not try to see if there’s something I can do to alleviate some of the misery in my own small way. But since that way would be extremely small given where the Automatic Earth’s financial situation and funding stand at the moment, I thought of something.

I’m hereby setting up an “Automatic Earth for Athens” fund (big word), and I’m asking you, our readership, to donate to that fund. I will make sure the revenues will go to clinics and food banks, to the worthiest causes I can find. To not mix up donations for Athens with those for the Automatic Earth, which are also badly needed, I suggest I take any donation that ends with 99 cents, as in $25.99, and single those out for Greece. Does that sound reasonable? Let me know if it doesn’t, please.

If you prefer to donate Bitcoin, our address is: 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT.

On to the second clinic that received some of your generosity. My friend, photographer and interpreter Dimitri said when we were on our way there on July 14 that these people have no idea what’s happening to them; they are busy all the time with what cannot be done, with trying to provide people with even the most basic care, and here comes this stranger who says he’ll give them €1000, just like that. A surefire recipe to make a body feel small.

By the way, Dimitri is also the author of a great line on the Europe/Greece financial conundrum:

Since I can’t pay on my bankrupt loans and you won’t renegotiate them with me, how’s about paying yourself back with a bridge loan to me so you won’t have to write off your debt, which I’ll likewise not pay back, to give you guys some more breathing room until you realize that I already told you I can’t pay you back.

A keeper for sure. On to Peristeri:

Some data I picked up: Peristeri is an Athens district with a population of 400,000 people. Most state health clinics have been shut. There were 150 doctors in the district before, there are now only 50. A population of 400,000 people with no access to gynaecologists or dermatologists, and just two cardiologists. Thousands of doctors have left the country. Those that have stayed, including senior hospital doctors, earn about €12,000 a year.

Social Solidarity Clinic of Peristeri

Xrisolora 1 & Ag, Pavlou, Athens, Peristeri 12132 

The clinic also functions as a pharmacy, they feed dozens of homeless people, and are involved in action against water privatization.

Dimitri and I talked to Nikos, the only person who spoke reasonable English, and Dr. Apostolos Gianopoulos, a retired physician who donates a lot of his time to the clinic. What an amazing bunch of people. Can you imagine this happening where you live?

Here’s the wonderfully chaotic drug cabinet:

How the drugs typically arrive, after volunteers go out and collect them:

The obligatory group portrait with yours truly:

And since I don’t seem to be able to find back the receipt they wrote, after looking for well over an hour yesterday (it’ll turn up), the actual handing over of the €1000:

A French film crew recently made a documentary about the clinic, and there is a video on YouTube. Unfortunately, it’s not in English, but you get a picture of the entire operation. They have all of 55 square meters at their disposal.

The blurb from the video:

For Two Years, Volunteers Run A Social Clinic/Pharmacy  

Today, more and more Greeks find themselves without health insurance. All over the country, clinics and pharmacies are organizing solidarity to support them. Reportage in one of them, in Athenian suburbs.

The small waiting room of the clinic at Peristeri is never empty in the late morning. In this suburb of Athens, a three-room apartment serves as both pharmacy and medical office. People come here to get medicines and also see a doctor, make an appointment to the dentist or even just talk. All this without paying anything.

Between calls, Georgette and Martina, the two volunteers in secretariat today, find a moment to discuss with each patient. “Now we know everyone,” says the latter. They, along with Dr. Gianopoulos and 50 volunteers and doctors, launched the initiative of a solidarity clinic and pharmacy two years ago. “With the crisis, more and more people have lost their social security for their families she explains. You really had to do something. ”

More than 3,000 patients

More than 3,000 patients walked through its doors. It has integrated the network of fifty solidarity clinics/pharmacies that cover the country. On the desk lies a secretariat agenda with impressive dimensions. The Bible testifies to the collective’s success and especially the willingness of the team to ensure regular monitoring of patients. “We receive many diabetics, people with asthma or heart,” says Dr. Apostolos Gianopoulos. Everyone can re-establish the treatment which had given up due to the loss of social security rights. “I remember a diabetic man who had lost two toes because it no longer followed his treatment,” says Martina.

“People in need were ashamed to ask for help”

More than the distribution of medicines, volunteers seek to create a space for solidarity and confidence. “At the beginning of the crisis, people in need were ashamed to ask for help, says Matina. They felt guilty not being able to support their families. But progressively, we have managed to establish a relationship of trust and anticipate their needs. ” In addition to the distribution of medicines, the medical center has also set up a food collection.

Coming to seek her package for the week, Anastasia demonstrates its involvement in the clinic work. After a successful career in the pharmaceutical industry, the single mother found herself unemployed. Today, she lives with her mother, who receives no pension, her 13 year old son and his brother, who earns only €400 per month. “I come here to get some medicine for my mom who is sick, she says. In exchange, I participate in various collections of food and medicine. ”

“The superstar here is the psychiatrist”

Like everyone who comes here, Anastasia will not depart only with a package but also with a smile. For Matina, it is also the moral support that people come up there. “We have a pediatrician, general practitioner, a dentist and several other doctors , but the superstar here is the psychiatrist,” she says.  At the social solidarity clinic of Peristeri volunteers claim a twofold objective: to provide primary healthcare, but also push people to make their voices heard on social issues.

I think the message is clear: the recipients of your donations are more than deserving, they do things, they show a wealth of solidarity, that in the rich nations of the world would be hard to imagine, and they merit our support in making that possible.

Our support in alleviating misery, pain, hunger, and also, crazy as it is, in saving people from dying from afflictions that are perfectly treatable, and that are treated all over Europe as a routine part of the healthcare system. That hardly anyone even gives a second thought in Germany, Holland, Britain, France. How can Brussels take that away from a nation? A nation that is highly educated to boot, that has plenty of doctors, of scientists?

In Greece, these treatments are no longer routine. People there have found another, much darker, routine. And we can make a difference. Not everywhere, but in plenty places, in plenty ways, and for a whole lot of people.