Sep 302024
 


Vincent van Gogh Roofs of Paris 1886

 

Musk Warns “If Trump Is Not Elected, This Will Be The Last Election” (ZH)
Free Speech Makes US ‘Hard To Govern’ – John Kerry (RT)
MTG Predicts Election Delay Or More Assassination Attempts Against Trump (JTN)
Michigan Lawmaker Admits Dire Internal Polling For Kamala Harris (ZH)
Trump Labels Harris ‘Mentally Impaired’ (RT)
When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris (Carden)
Lebowitz Calls for Biden-Harris to “Dissolve the Supreme Court” (Turley)
Biden Broke His Word To Congress – WSJ (RT)
Pentagon Chief ‘Blew Up’ as Israel Notified US of Strike on Nasrallah (Sp.)
Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Arabs (Helmer)
Famine In Europe: The Real Goal Of Anti-Russian Policies (SCF)
Watching the China River Flow (Pepe Escobar)
Beyond Hegemony (Jeffrey Sachs)
Obama Was A ‘Simp’ For The Deep State – Brother (RT)
Putin Proved Me Correct (Paul Craig Roberts)

 

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1840125327399629120

 

 

 

 

RFK

 

 

Football

 

 

Jimmy Dore

 

 

Lauria

 

 

Ritter
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840235654908686363

 

 

Ballmer

 

 

BORDER CZAR
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840055614967345259

 

 

 

 

The numbers add up.

Musk Warns “If Trump Is Not Elected, This Will Be The Last Election” (ZH)

Elon Musk has argued that the influx of illegal immigrants into the United States, “something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible,” will effectively establish a ‘one-party state and Democracy is over.’ Responding to a thread on X in which Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) pointed out that the DOJ is suing Alabama for trying to remove noncitizens from its voting lists, and blocked the SAVE Act – Musk noted that “Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco”:

“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it! Let me explain: if even 1 in 20 illegals become citizens per year, something that the Democrats are expediting as fast as humanly possible, that would be about 2 million new legal voters in 4 years. The voting margin in the swing states is often less than 20 thousand votes. That means if the “Democratic” Party succeeds, there will be no more swing states!! Moreover, the Biden/Harris administration has been flying “asylum seekers”, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.

America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over. The only “elections” will be the Democratic Party primaries. This already happened in California many years ago, following the 1986 amnesty. The only thing holding California back from extreme socialism and suffocating government policies is that people can leave California and still remain in America. Once the whole country is controlled by one party, there will be no escape. Everywhere in America will be like the nightmare that is downtown San Francisco.”

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But that’s the whole idea.

Free Speech Makes US ‘Hard To Govern’ – John Kerry (RT)

The freedom for individuals to choose their sources of information makes it difficult to reach consensus and, consequently, to govern effectively, former presidential climate envoy John Kerry stated. At a World Economic Forum (WEF) panel on Green Energy last week, the former Secretary of State under President Barack Obama criticized the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects freedom of speech and the press, among other things. Kerry pointed out that social media poses challenges for building consensus in democracies. “It’s really hard to govern today,” he remarked. “The referees we used to have to determine what is fact and what isn’t have kind of been eviscerated,” he noted, adding that individuals now decide where to get their news.

“If people go to only one source… and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to simply hammering it out of existence,” he asserted. As long as Democrats can “win ground” and “win the right to govern,” they would be “free to implement change,” the former Democratic senator stated. “I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to address the challenges we face. To me, that is part of what this race, this election, is all about,” he added.

At another WEF event earlier this year, Wall Street Journal Editor in Chief Emma Tucker lamented the loss of corporate media’s monopoly on information. “We owned the news. We were the gatekeepers, and we very much owned the facts as well,” she said, noting that customers now have access to a broader array of sources. Amid increasingly divisive election rhetoric, research suggests that Americans trust the media even less than they are willing to publicly admit. While 24 percent of Americans claim to trust the media to tell the truth, only 7 percent believe it privately, according to a study completed in June by the think tank Populace, in cooperation with Gradient and YouGov.

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“The momentum shift has happened and Trump is leading and his support is rapidly accelerating..”

MTG Predicts Election Delay Or More Assassination Attempts Against Trump (JTN)

Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., on Saturday predicted that more assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump could occur as the election gets closer. “We have entered the most dangerous phase of the election,” Greene said on the social media platform, X. “The momentum shift has happened and Trump is leading and his support is rapidly accelerating. I’m hearing it everywhere, even where I was not before. Democrats will do anything to stop him.” She said that there have already been two assassination attempts on Trump’s life.

“They’ve already been trying to put him in prison and literally assassinate him,” Greene wrote. “What comes next? More assassination attempts? Will they delay the election? Be prepared.” Trump has had two assassination attempts on his life. One was at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and the other in Florida while he was golfing. As the election gets closer, both Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris have been traveling around the U.S. doing rallies. (JTN)

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Money Talks, But Polls Walk

Michigan Lawmaker Admits Dire Internal Polling For Kamala Harris (ZH)

In a Sunday bombshell, Axios reports that Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) has privately warned donors that Vice President Kamala Harris is “underwater” in Michigan – a critical battleground state for Democrats – according to a video clip obtained by the outlet. Slotkin’s revelation comes at a time when the Dems are fighting tooth and nail to hold onto the Senate, and Michigan could be a deciding factor. During a virtual fundraiser last Wednesday with Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Slotkin didn’t mince words. “I’m not feeling my best right now about where we are on Kamala Harris in a place like Michigan,” she admitted, further stating that their internal polling shows Harris sinking in the Wolverine State. The news comes as a blow Democrats as they eye a tough Senate race where Slotkin herself is vying for a seat against GOP contender, former Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI).

Michigan is a critical state for Democrats. If Trump sweeps the Sun Belt, taking Michigan – or any state in the so-called “Blue Wall” that includes Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, it could pave his way back to the White House. Recent polling averages from FiveThirtyEight have Harris ahead by just 2.4 points, while a New York Times/Siena College poll puts her lead at a razor-thin 1 point. Meanwhile, Senate Republicans smell blood in the water. Slotkin’s Senate race has seen millions of dollars pour in, with GOP operatives sensing a prime opportunity to flip the seat. Republican internal polling suggests the race may be neck-and-neck, despite some public polls showing Slotkin with a narrow lead.

While Slotkin’s public polling paints a more optimistic picture, with RealClearPolitics giving her a 48% to 43% edge, Republicans are raising alarms. GOP strategists believe the Michigan Senate race is tightening, especially as Slotkin’s campaign fights off the GOP war chest. With Slotkin admitting Harris is struggling in Michigan, it’s clear Democrats have a lot to worry about in 2024. The Senate map isn’t doing Democrats any favors either. While ruby-red Ohio and Montana have been getting attention, a surprise Republican win in Michigan could virtually guarantee a GOP majority come next November.

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“..Saturday, Harris vowed to step up deportations and deny asylum to migrants who cross the border outside legal entry points.”

Trump Labels Harris ‘Mentally Impaired’ (RT)

Former US President Donald Trump has labeled Vice President Kamala Harris “mentally impaired” for immigration policies that apparently allowed more than 400,000 convicted criminals to walk freely into the US. According to data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this week, 425,431 convicted criminals and 222,141 people with pending criminal charges entered the US illegally and are living free inside the country while awaiting court hearings or deportation proceedings. These include 62,231 convicted of assault, 56,533 with drug convictions, and 13,099 convicted of homicide. An additional 15,811 have sexual assault convictions. At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Saturday, Trump declared that Harris should be “impeached and removed from office” for allowing this many criminals into the country.

Harris let in “some of the worst murderers you’ve ever seen,” he claimed, “and that’s not even mentioning the rapists, the gang members, the drug dealers, the child predators, and the traffickers in women.” “[President] Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way. She was born that way. And if you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country,” he said. It is unclear whether all of the criminals mentioned by ICE entered the US while Biden and Harris were in office. However, one of Biden’s first acts as president was to reinstate the Obama-era policy of ‘catch and release’, under which illegal migrants entering the US are detained, and then immediately released with orders to show up at immigration hearings years in the future. Under Trump, migrants arrested by law enforcement agents were taken straight to detention centers from 2019 onwards.

There were around 10.2 million illegal immigrants living in the US in 2020. Under Biden, who tasked Harris in 2021 with overseeing border security, at least 10.6 million more have entered the country, according to US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) figures. The 425,431 convicted criminals counted by ICE are drawn from a list of over 7 million migrants who are awaiting removal proceedings but are not in custody. As such, the true number of criminal aliens living in the US could be vastly higher. Voters concerned about immigration overwhelmingly trust Trump to tackle the issue. In a bid to close this gap, Harris has distanced herself from past comments on immigration – for example, comparing ICE to the Ku Klux Klan and chanting “down with deportation” at a protest. During a visit to the US-Mexico border on Saturday, Harris vowed to step up deportations and deny asylum to migrants who cross the border outside legal entry points.

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“..columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris “strangely moving..”

When Odious Foreign Policy Elites Rally Around Harris (Carden)

Efforts to bolster the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris by the D.C. foreign policy establishment kicked into overdrive over the course of the past week with the near simultaneous release of two open letters signed by hundreds of former U.S. national security officials. It is an accelerated version of previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020, where ex-officials and military officers on both sides of the aisle vocalizing major opposition to Trump offer to give national security cred to the Democratic candidate — in this case Harris. For their part, the candidate virtually ignores that many of these endorsements are in many cases coming from odious individuals, including architects of wars and interventions that Democrats have openly criticized as stains on recent American history.

The first was a letter signed by over 100 former Republican national security officials stating that while they, alumni of every Republican administration from Reagan to Trump, “expect to disagree with Kamala Harris on many domestic and foreign policy issues” they also “firmly oppose the election of Donald Trump.” According to the former GOP officials, Trump’s “susceptibility to flattery and manipulation by Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, unusual affinity for other authoritarian leaders, contempt for the norms of decent, ethical and lawful behavior, and chaotic national security decision-making” render him a danger to U.S. national security interests. Critics of course point out that many of these people are the same Washington creatures who got our country into endless foreign wars and profited from them for 20 years straight — and until this day support cruel, authoritarian dictators when convenient to U.S. policy. They are not wrong.

As a group, the signatories of the first letter are a very mixed bag. The missive does feature a few sensible, responsible pillars of the Washington establishment, including those of former defense secretary (and U.S. senator) Chuck Hagel, and former FBI and CIA director William Webster. Yet for the most part, the letter carried with it the odor of the consensus minded War Party, if not 9/11-era neoconservatism. In the past this would have been a problem for traditionally liberal and progressive outlets, but Mother Jones and the New Republic were quick to applaud the letter as a “win” for the Harris campaign. Not surprisingly, only The Nation has called out their fellow liberals and progressives for making common cause with the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, both of whom have also endorsed Harris in recent days (except for columnist Joan Walsh, who found Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Harris “strangely moving,” writing, “Liz, I told you we could find common ground. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or even a beer?”

This columnist at Al Jazeera, however, offers no stated desire for beers with the Cheneys, particularly father Dick. “What makes Cheney’s endorsement, and the Democratic Party’s embrace of it, particularly galling is the way in which they gloss over these past sins in order to paint him as a guardian of American values,” charged Howard University Law school professor Ziyad Motola.

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No Supreme Court and no Constitution. Pretty soon after that, you’ll have no country.

Lebowitz Calls for Biden-Harris to “Dissolve the Supreme Court” (Turley)

Author and cultural critic Fran Lebowitz added voice to the unhinged calls on the left for trashing the Supreme Court. As I discussed recently in the Wall Street Journal (and in my book), there is a growing counter-constitutional movement in the United States led by law professors, pundits, and celebrities. Lebowitz amplified those calls in a radical demand to simply get rid of the Court. Lebowitz called for President Joe Biden to “dissolve the Supreme Court” despite the fact that it would violate the Constitution and remove one of the most critical protections against executive and legislative abuse. Lebowitz insisted that the Supreme Court is a “disgrace” because, in a reference to Donald Trump, it is “completely his.” To the wild applause of the New York audience, she added: “It’s so disgraceful, this court, that it shouldn’t even be allowed to be called the Supreme Court. It’s an insult to Motown. Basically, it’s a harem. It’s Trump’s harem.”

Her views aligned with others on the left who have attacked the Constitution, the Court, and even rights like free speech as now threats to our democracy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer previously declared in front of the Supreme Court, “I want to tell you, [Neil] Gorsuch, I want to tell you, [Brett] Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) announced that she wants the impeachment of all six of the conservative justices. She was immediately joined by other Democratic members. Previously, Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she does not understand why we even have a Supreme Court. She asked “How much does the current structure benefit us? And I don’t think it does.” Other members, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have called for packing the Court with additional members to immediately secure a liberal majority to rule as she desires.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., RI), has assured voters that Vice President Kamala Harris will support the packing of the Court with a liberal majority. Despite supporting censorship to combat “disinformation,” many on the left now eagerly spread disinformation about the Court and its rulings. Lebowitz repeated false claims about the Court’s ruling on presidential immunity, stating that the decision makes the president a “king” who “can do whatever you want.” In reality, the Court followed the same approach that it has taken in prior conflicts between the branches. As it has in the past, the Court adopted a three-tiered approach to presidential powers based on the source of a presidential action. Chief Justice John Roberts cited Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer, in which the court ruled against President Harry Truman’s takeover of steel mills.

In his famous concurrence to Youngstown, Justice Robert Jackson broke down the balance of executive and legislative authority between three types of actions. In the first, a president acts with express or implied authority from Congress. In the second, he acts where Congress is silent (“the zone of twilight” area). In the third, the president acts in defiance of Congress. In this decision, the court adopted a similar sliding scale. It held that presidents enjoy absolute immunity for actions that fall within their “exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” while they enjoy presumptive immunity for other official acts. They do not enjoy immunity for unofficial or private actions. None of this matters. Facts do not matter. Many on the left are calling for the trashing of the Constitution based on wildly inaccurate claims.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, is author of “No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States,” published last month. In a 2021 Los Angeles Times op-ed, he described conservative justices as “partisan hacks.” In the New York Times, book critic Jennifer Szalai scoffs at what she calls “Constitution worship.” She writes: “Americans have long assumed that the Constitution could save us; a growing chorus now wonders whether we need to be saved from it.” She frets that by limiting the power of the majority, the Constitution “can end up fostering the widespread cynicism that helps authoritarianism grow.” In a 2022 New York Times op-ed, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” law professors Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale called for liberals to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

Lebowitz is also wrong about the voting record of the justices. In reality, the Court continues to rule largely by unanimous, or nearly unanimous decisions. After April, unanimity stood at 46 percent of cases. Of the 22 6-3 decisions, only half broke along ideological lines. That is the same as the 11 such cases last term. The average for unanimous decisions has been roughly 43 percent. The rate is back up to 48 percent for the last term. When you add the nearly unanimous opinions, it is the vast majority of cases. Moreover, Sotomayor agreed with Roberts in 71% of cases Kavanaugh and Barrett agreed with Sotomayor roughly 70% of the time. In critical decisions, conservative justices like Gorsuch and Barrett have joined their liberal colleagues and the Court has repeatedly voted against positions supported by Donald Trump.

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“One of the conditions stipulated was that the Biden administration articulate a strategy regarding US support for Ukraine within 45 days of the budget’s enactment, and quarterly moving forward..”

Biden Broke His Word To Congress – WSJ (RT)

US President Joe Biden has not been honest with the American public about his administration’s plan for Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in an article on Friday. Despite Biden styling himself a supporter of Ukraine’s freedom in his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, he refuses to level with Congress and the American public about his strategy to achieve victory, the editorial stated. In April, lawmakers passed a nearly $61 billion supplemental budget for Ukraine, after months of wrangling between Democrats and Republicans. One of the conditions stipulated was that the Biden administration articulate a strategy regarding US support for Ukraine within 45 days of the budget’s enactment, and quarterly moving forward. “Biden knew this commitment was necessary to get aid through Congress, and he signed the bill,” WSJ observed.

Despite this, the strategy was submitted “months after the congressionally-mandated deadline,” the newspaper said, citing a press release from GOP lawmakers. “Also, and this is typical of the Biden stonewall: The document is entirely classified,” WSJ wrote, adding that congressmen want the strategy made available to the American public. ”Don’t count on the Administration following this order before Nov. 5, if it ever does,” the board said. “A public release might mean that Vice President Kamala Harris would have to explain her own thinking on the war before the election. As long as she doesn’t, and the Administration covers it up, Ms. Harris co-owns Mr. Biden’s record of muddled half measures.”

The Biden administration announced a further $8 billion in military aid for Kiev on Thursday, reserving the remainder of a large Congressionally-approved allocation set to expire by the end of September. This came right after Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky visited the US to pitch what he termed his “victory plan” to his biggest sponsor. According to several Western media sources, Kiev’s wishes are now increasingly clashing with those of its backers in the West. Its allies have also so far denied its ever-more urgent demands to allow the use of Western-supplied arms to strike deep into Russian territory.

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“..there are many US troops stationed in the Middle East, and they had a very short time to prepare for possible hostile military response..”

Pentagon Chief ‘Blew Up’ as Israel Notified US of Strike on Nasrallah (Sp.)

Israel gave a “few minutes notice” to the United States about its intention to strike the secretary general of Lebanese movement Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, enraging Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, US media reported.
Defense Secretary Austin “blew up” when Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant informed him about the strikes on Nasrallah, as there are many US troops stationed in the Middle East, and they had a very short time to prepare for possible hostile military response to the assassination, the publication explained. Since last week, the Israeli Air Force has been carrying out massive strikes on Hezbollah targets in various parts of Lebanon. Several precision airstrikes were also recorded in Beirut, killing senior Hezbollah commanders, including Nasrallah.

To date, the Israeli army has reported strikes on several thousand Hezbollah targets. Observers note that Israel has not attacked Hezbollah with such intensity since the Second Lebanon War in 2006. Hezbollah has responded with rocket fire primarily at northern Israel, but the range of rocket attacks has increased significantly in recent days. The situation on the Israeli-Lebanese border has escalated since the start of Israeli military action in the Gaza Strip in October 2023. Tensions are growing amid statements by the Israeli military about preparations for a ground operation in Lebanon.

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“The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century..”

Jewish Anti-Semitism Towards Arabs (Helmer)

In the history of imperial conquest and rule of the Arabs – that’s Turkish, Italian, British, French, American, Israeli – decapitation of leaders has always been preferable to genocide of peoples because it’s much cheaper. Slavery, as the Portuguese empire first developed it, was the cost accountant’s solution to making genocide pay for itself – pay lucrative profits in fact. How profitable the bribery and killing methods of American decapitation of the secular Arab nationalists have been since 1943 is the story told in The Jackals’ Wedding. The combination of decapitation and genocide now being pursued by the Israelis lacks the usual cost-accounting restrictions. This is because the imperial ideologies have turned into God-dictated duty, Crusader zealotry revived, but this time Judaeo rather than Christian, rabbinical rather than papal. It is also because the US government is paying the bill. Faith in the transubstantiation of the Jewish state would wither away much quicker than the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem without US cash, capital, and underwriter guarantees.

That kingdom lasted 192 years; Israel is 76 years old; Zionism, 127 years. In self-defence, popular resistance and national liberation of the Arabs, religious conviction can only be as effective as there is military capacity for the fight. The will to fight without the weapons is doomed; just as the war-fighting capacities of the Arabs are doomed if they are inadequate – sabotaged and betrayed off the battlefield; out-gunned if used in combat; held back without a fight. For reminder of how long the present long war will be, let’s repeat this from the beginning last October. The Semites, the Semitic peoples, and speakers of the Semitic languages started as a figment of the German imagination in the late 18th century and early 19th century. It quickly became a German racial epithet, used in contrast to Aryan. By the time Adolf Hitler came along, this was the pseudo-scientific doctrine in which the Germans lumped both the Jews and the Arabs into a single category – the inferiors of the Aryans.

That is one of the reasons Hitler refused to listen to the advice of his general staff on aiding the Arab nationalist forces in Iraq, Syria and Palestine in the Wehrmacht’s war plans against the British and the Soviet Union. The pseudo-science of Semitism and Aryanism, and the idea of anti-Semitism which the Germans, together with the British and Americans, adopted in the run-up to World War II was spelled out at Harvard University by an anthropologist called Carleton Coon; he cribbed directly from German academics, turning out papers on the Berbers of Morocco and advancing his racial superiority-inferiority ideas between 1925 and 1939. When the war began, Coon joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he demonstrated his keenness for pistol shooting, hare-brained sabotage missions, and homicidal mania. Among his wartime schemes he proposed to remove the Arabs of the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia) as unfit to rule; replace them with the restoration of the French empire; and kill those French officials whom Coon judged to get his way.

He was one of the planners of the assassination of Admiral Francois Darlan, the French military commander, in Algiers on December 24, 1942; Coon’s pistol was the murder weapon.** American murderers of the Arabs like Coon then — like Israeli murderers of Arabs now — have succeeded in establishing their doctrine of exceptionalism and racial superiority in state policy as the successor to the doctrines of Aryanism and Nazism which were interrupted by Hitler’s suicide in 1945, then the Nuremberg trials concluding in 1946. The crime of racial and cultural genocide became international law in 1948. It was then modified by the new Israeli state doctrine of anti-Semitism: this decriminalised the genocide of the Palestinian people; and outlawed instead media criticism, political opposition, even science for threatening the legitimacy of Israel’s Basic Law of Arab exclusion, and Israeli military operations to enforce it.

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“Thousands of Bulgarian farmers are going bankrupt, and the crisis is only expected to get worse in the near future.”

Famine In Europe: The Real Goal Of Anti-Russian Policies (SCF)

The controversy over Ukrainian agricultural products continues. Ukrainian food products have simply invaded the European market and are driving thousands of farmers out of business. Despite the protests and political pressure, no EU decision-maker seems interested in changing this tragic scenario. However, the crisis seems to have even deeper dimensions and could be a real time bomb for the entire European society. The Bulgarian government recently asked the European Commission to pass a resolution banning the import of Ukrainian chicken eggs. According to the Bulgarian authorities, the large amount of cheap Ukrainian eggs on the European market is hurting Bulgarian producers, who rely on egg sales as a vital part of their business. Thousands of Bulgarian farmers are going bankrupt, and the crisis is only expected to get worse in the near future.

The problem is not limited to eggs or Bulgaria. Selling grain, meat, dairy products and everything that is produced in the countryside seems to be no longer an attractive business in Europe. Since 2022, protests for change have been taking place in all parts of the European continent. From Poland to France, no European farmer is happy to see his products being replaced on the market by massive quantities of cheap Ukrainian agricultural items. This is due to the irrational decision of European decision-makers to ban all import tariffs on Ukrainian food products. The measure is allegedly intended to boost the Ukrainian economy during the crisis caused by the conflict with Russia – which ironically is sponsored by the West itself. In the current European market, it is cheaper to import Ukrainian food than to resell the native products, which is obviously causing thousands of farmers to abandon their businesses.

As well known, most of Europe does not have a very strong agricultural sector, with local farmers relying on government aid to stay active in the market. Without this aid and with the invasion of Ukrainian products, it is simply no longer profitable to be part of European agribusiness, which is why thousands of people are likely to stop working in the rural areas and join the growing class of the European “precariat”. At first, some analysts may see this scenario as a mere market shift, replacing European production with Ukrainian production. However, this analysis is limited. Despite having some of the most fertile soils in the world, Ukraine is currently a target of Western financial predators, who demand the handover of arable land as a means of payment for NATO’s billion-dollar aid packages. Organizations such as Blackrock and other funds will soon own almost all that is left of Ukraine’s “black soil.”

And then Ukrainian agricultural production will depend on the willingness of the “financial sharks” to feed the Europeans. It is true that the lack of food self-sufficiency in European countries is not a new problem. Imports are already a vital mechanism for all of Western Europe. But parallel to the dependence on imports, there is also the irrational policy of sanctions and coercive measures against several emerging food-producing countries. The Russian Federation, for example, is prohibited from selling anything to Europeans, but the problem is even greater. The EU has been considering for years imposing severe sanctions on Brazil, for example, alleging “environmental irregularities”. It will get to the point where the EU’s “humanitarian and environmental” requirements will prevent Europeans from buying anything from any country.

If we ask who is interested in this whole scenario, the answer will once again seem clear. There is only one country encouraging Europe to impose more and more sanctions, buy more and more Ukrainian grain and send more and more weapons to Kiev under payment terms regulated by Blackrock. Of course, this is the same country that boycotted Russian-European energy cooperation and committed the terrorist attack on Nord Stream. And certainly this is also the only state interested in maintaining the geopolitical status quo and preventing the creation of a multipolar world, where Europeans would have freedom of alignment and could pragmatically choose their partners.

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“..like a river undisturbed while traversing a rocky wilderness, China silently flows away on its path to peaceful primacy.”

Watching the China River Flow (Pepe Escobar)

Leading website Guancha has published the transcript of a first-class lecture at Renmin University on China-U.S. relations by Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World. Jacques is one of the very few Westerner scholars with on the ground experience who actually understands the Chinese psyche and way of life in contrast to the West. A particularly intriguing section of the lecture concerns research by Danny Quah, the dean of the widely respected Lee Kuan Yew Institute in Singapore. This is the money quote: “Between 1980 and 2020, Europe’s share of global GDP fell from 26% to 15%. In other words, it fell by 11 percentage points, a very large drop. Although the decline in the United States was smaller, it fell from 21% in the 1980s to less than 16% in 2020. From another perspective, Asia and East Asia are constantly rising. The share in 1980 was 11.5%, and it has risen to 25% in 2020. Among this 25%, China has made the largest contribution, accounting for 18% of the world.”

What this graphically illustrates is the acute swing in the world’s center of economic gravity – no matter the rhetorical tsunamis emanating from the Hegemon. In 1980 the economic center was Atlanticist. Quah though believes that the economic center will reach the Sino-Indian border only by 2050. When we take China compounded with the 10 members of ASEAN, without even considering South Asia, it’s fair to argue that the economic center will already be in the East by 2030, and will be Sino-Indian before 2040. Jacques is correct that by then “the ‘Asian Age’ will replace the ‘Western Age’, and since 1750, the world has always been in the Western Age.” On a personal note, after living and working in Asia for most of the past three decades, I qualify our century as “The Eurasian Century”.

And that, in a nutshell, is the reason why the Hegemon/Atlanticist elites are in Deep Panic mode. The free lunch – of exploiting the wealth of the Global South – is coming to an end. China has already designed the masterplan of its development strategy all the way to 2035 and in many aspects all the way to 2049. The current juncture though is extremely tricky. The People’s Bank of China is taking the necessary master tweaks of the economy very seriously. Earlier this week the PBoC announced cuts to the outstanding mortgage rate and the reserve requirement ratio: that’s the amount of cash commercial banks need to hold as reserves. The PBoC also cut the benchmark policy rate and boosted capital markets. Then the Politburo, chaired by President Xi Jinping himself, intervened in full force, vowing to protect China’s private enterprises; finally stabilise the always wobbly property sector; and adopt the necessary fiscal expenditures.

That’s the domestic front. On the external front, China is on a roll. The top priority is the slowly but surely internationalization of the yuan. And that’s where the crucial role of Hong Kong comes in – as detailed in a report by Renmin University. China is already de-dollarizing at nearly breakneck speed. The U.S. dollar’s share of bilateral trade has already fallen from 80% to less than 50%. China is now trading with the world mostly in yuan – and the petroyuan is not even in full force. Since the start of the SMO by Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, the yuan is the de facto Asian reserve currency for Russia. In parallel, Beijing is accelerating currency swaps all across the spectrum and designating more clearing banks around the world.

From Beijing to Hong Kong, Chinese politico-economic elites are quite comfortable with the fact that for the first time in History, the rise of a great power is not being conditioned by imperialism, war, slavery, looting and all of the above, but under what has been codified since the Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping’s late 1970s reforms as “peaceful development.” That is mirrored in several concepts such as win-win; mutual prosperity; equality; “community of shared future for mankind”; and as a master geoeconomic project, the interlocking connectivity corridors across the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). While China invests in infrastructure development around the world, the Hegemon imposes sanctions, engages in bombing, supports variations of the Forever Wars, finances and weaponizes color revolutions.

Hegemon “strategy” barely qualifying as utter mediocrity ranges from the U.S. government funding a $1.6 billion campaign to smear China to Republicans divided on whether regime change in Beijing is their ultimate goal and the Democrat ambassador in Beijing convinced that Washington’s China policy is not too hawkish. Then there’s puny functionary and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell – the man who invented the “pivot to Asia” during the first Obama administration – ordering the Europeans to go hawkish on China and defining Beijing in front of the House Foreign Affairs Committee as “the most significant challenge in our history”. Very few IQs above room temperature across Asia pay attention to such clowns. In contrast, what is now emerging in informed discussions from South to Southeast Asia is that BRICS progress will not be steady enough if the emphasis remains on consensual decisions.

A daring proposition is emerging that Russia and China – the actual BRICS leaders – should announce at the summit in Kazan next month that they are backing a yuan/ruble/gold alliance: as in if the world needs to choose between NATOstan hegemony or a BRICS alternative, better start with sound (real) money. Beyond the feasibility of such proposal, there’s a serious critique of Utopia; the Global Majority must be pushed to face the harsh reality it faces – nuclear destruction or an imperfect evolving new order – and make a stand, fast. Meanwhile, like a river undisturbed while traversing a rocky wilderness, China silently flows away on its path to peaceful primacy.

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“The late, great evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, often described our predicament as follows: “We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies.”

“We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.”

Beyond Hegemony (Jeffrey Sachs)

We are at a new phase of human history because of the confluence of three interrelated trends. First, and most pivotal, the Western-led world system, in which countries of the North Atlantic region dominate the world militarily, economically, and financially, has ended. Second, the global ecological crisis marked by human-induced climate change, the destruction of biodiversity, and the massive pollution of the environment, will lead to fundamental changes of the world economy and governance. Third, the rapid advance of technologies across several domains—artificial intelligence, computing, biotechnology, geoengineering—will profoundly disrupt the world economy and politics. These interconnecting developments—geopolitical, environmental, and technological—are stoking huge uncertainties, societal dislocations, political crises, and open wars.

To address these pivotal developments, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a Summit of the Future (SOTF) (September 22-23rd, 2024 at the UN headquarters in New York) to reform our international institutions so that they are fit for purpose in our fast-changing world. Since global peace depends more than ever on the efficacy of the UN and international law, the SOTF should be a watershed in global governance, even if it does no more than point the way to further negotiation and deliberation in the years immediately ahead. Our existing institutions, both national and international, are certainly not up to the task of governance in our fast-changing world. The late, great evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, often described our predicament as follows: “We have stumbled into the twenty-first century with stone-age emotions, medieval institutions, and near godlike technologies.”

By this he meant that we face our challenges today with the basic cognitive and emotional human nature that was formed by human evolution tens of thousands of years ago, with political institutions forged centuries ago (the U.S. Constitution was drafted in 1787), and with the lightning speed of technological advance (think of ChatGPT as just the latest wonder). Perhaps the most basic fact of deep societal change is uncertainty, and the most basic reaction to uncertainty is fear. In fact, the technological advances—if used correctly—could solve innumerable problems in economic development, social justice (e.g., improved access to healthcare and education through digital connectivity), and environmental sustainability (e.g., a rapid transition to zero-carbon energy sources). Yet the mood today is anything but optimistic, especially in the West. Open wars rage between the United States and Russia in Ukraine, and between U.S.-backed Israel and Palestine.

The possibility of war between the United States and China is widely, openly, and even casually discussed in Washington, though such a war could mean the end of civilization itself. At the root of these conflicts is fear, built on our stone-age emotions. The biggest fear of all is that of many American and European political leaders that the West is losing its hegemony after centuries, and that somehow the loss of hegemony will have catastrophic consequences. Former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made this Western fear explicit in an April 2024 column for the UK’s Daily Mail, when he stated that if the West loses the war in Ukraine, “it will be the end of Western hegemony.”

Herein lies the essence of the Ukraine war, and many other global conflicts as well. The United States and its allies want to expand NATO to Ukraine. Russia has firmly said no. Both Washington and London were ready to fight a war with Russia over NATO enlargement to protect Western hegemony (specifically, the right to dictate security arrangements to Russia), while Russia was ready to fight a war in order to keep NATO away. In fact, Russia is prevailing on the battlefield over Ukraine’s army and NATO’s armaments. This is not surprising. What is perhaps surprising is how the West completely underestimated Russia’s capabilities.

In broad terms, with the changing global order, including the rise of China and the rest of East Asia, the military and technological strength of Russia, the rapid development of India, and the growing unity of Africa, the Western-dominated world has been brought to an end, not by a tumultuous collapse of the West, but by the growing economic, technological, and therefore military, power of the rest of the world. In principle, the West has no reason to fear the rise of the rest, as the United States and Europe still maintain an overwhelming deterrence, including nuclear deterrence, against any military threat from the outside. The West is bemoaning its loss of relative status—the ability to dictate to others—not any real military insecurity.

Nothing is going to restore Western hegemony in the coming years—no military victory, technological advance, or economic leverage. The rise of advanced military, technological, economic, and financial capacities to Asia and beyond, is unstoppable (and of course should not be stopped, since it signifies a world that is fairer and more prosperous than the preceding Western-dominated world). Yet, the end of Western hegemony does not mean a new Chinese, Indian, or Asian hegemony. There are simply too many power centers—the United States, the EU, China, Russia, India, the African Union, etc.—and too much capacity and diversity to enable any other hegemon to replace the Western-led world order. We have arrived, after centuries of Western dominance, to a world beyond hegemony.

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“to be the president of the USA, he had to have the backing of certain people like the Clintons” and “the [George] Soros people…the ones who are really controlling everything out there.”

Obama Was A ‘Simp’ For The Deep State – Brother (RT)

Barack Obama courted the ‘deep state’ during his rise to power, and once in office was powerless to disobey their orders, the former US president’s half-brother has told Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi. In an interview set to air on Monday, Malik Obama told Rattansi that before he entered the corridors of power, Barack Obama “was a really humble, really nice person.” However, “to be the president of the USA, he had to have the backing of certain people like the Clintons” and “the [George] Soros people…the ones who are really controlling everything out there.” Keeping their backing, along with the support of the deep state, was crucial to Barack Obama, and Malik suggested that his half-brother wouldn’t have dared oppose the 2014 coup in Ukraine or the 2011 regime-change operation against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.

“He would have lost his support,” Malik said. “He would not be what he is today, because those people are the ones that propped him up and he had to play to them.” “That’s why I like President Trump,” he continued, “because he does things his own way. He reached out to North Korea and met the leader there. [Obama] could have done that for Muammar Gaddafi. I think he’s just… he’s a simp.” The term ‘deep state’ refers to the unelected and often unknown government bureaucrats who steer government policy, particularly the leaders of intelligence agencies and the military. Malik Obama has the same father as the ex-president, and visited the White House several times during his brother’s first term in office. However, he later claimed that Barack was “cold and ruthless,” and blasted him for abandoning his Kenyan family.

He has since made a series of bizarre claims about the former president, apparently announcing last year that Barack Obama is “definitely gay,” and alleging in 2017 that he was born in Kenya. Malik Obama is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump, who before running for office in 2016 challenged Barack Obama to produce his birth certificate over doubts he was born in the US. Trump later abandoned the dispute and admitted that Obama was born in the US. During the full interview with Rattansi, Malik Obama discussed the current state of his relationship with his brother, and Barack’s alleged role in forcing President Joe Biden to end his reelection campaign.

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” If there is peace with Russia, the military/security complex loses its enemy, which means its power and its budget. Now watch dumbshit Americans vote Democrat and bring Armageddon upon the world.”

Putin Proved Me Correct (Paul Craig Roberts)

For years I have warned that Putin’s refusal to quickly win the conflict with Ukraine would result in increasing Western intervention until the conflict spins out of control. That has now happened. NATO’s Secretary General and the British Prime Minister have given a green light to NATO firing missiles into Russia from Ukraine. The green light is subject to Washington’s veto. Zelensky, the Ukrainian dictator whose term as president has expired, was reportedly recently in Washington lobbying the Biden regime to give its approval. Be sure you understand what Zelensky is lobbying the Biden regime to do. If the Biden regime gives the go-ahead, Europe, the US, and Ukraine will be destroyed. Here is Putin’s statement. It is a back-to-the-wall statement, as I predicted it would be: “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

So, as I correctly predicted would be the case, a never-ending conflict that drew in the West to increasingly provocative participation has spun out of control. So far everything Washington said would not be done has been done. The final red line is NATO sending missiles into Russia. If this no-no also becomes a yes-yes “because Putin never responds,” war is upon us. It has played out precisely as I said. Yet, I was either ignored by “experts” who are nothing but mouthpieces for the military-security complex, or denounced by fools as “blood-thirsty.” The fact remains: one more wrong decision from the White House and we are history.

Remember, it was Trump who wanted to normalize relations with Russia. The crazed CIA director called the President of the United States a “traitor.” Trump’s own Justice (sic) Department and FBI and the American presstitute media along with Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party fabricated a Russiagate case against Trump, brought two false impeachments against him, cooked up stripper gate, documents gate, and an “insurrection.” One thousand Americans who exercised their First Amendment rights were sentenced by a totally corrupt DOJ to prison. Once Trump announced a second campaign for the presidency, the false accusations were turned into false indictments. All of this was done to prevent peace with Russia. If there is peace with Russia, the military/security complex loses its enemy, which means its power and its budget. Now watch dumbshit Americans vote Democrat and bring Armageddon upon the world.

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Assange Nasrallah

 

 

Cancer

 

 

Geese
https://twitter.com/i/status/1840294827033772126

 

 

Gardiner

 

 

23

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in wartime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

 

 

Jun 092022
 


Pablo Picasso Rest 1932

 

Zelensky Vows “Full De-Occupation Of Entire Territory” (ZH)
For Europe, From Russia, With Love (Vilches)
Kyiv Keeps US in the Dark on War Realities: NYT (Celente)
Is US/NATO (with WEF help) Pushing For A Global South Famine? (Hudson)
Ukraine to Ban ‘War and Peace’ From Being Taught in Schools (SN)
Is Lasting Peace Possible? (Hathaway)
Healthy Young People Are Dying Unexpectedly From A Mysterious Syndrome (DM)
Fifth Jab Being Considered In Israel (JPost)
Moderna Says Omicron-containing Booster Outperforms Current Vaccine (Stat)
How Fake Is Twitter’s User Data? (ET)
Twitter Will Reportedly Give Its Full Data Stream To Elon Musk (Eng.)
168,000 Deleted Files Recovered From Hunter Biden’s Laptop (WE)
What is a Woman? (Laura Dodsworth)
This Is What Erdogan Promised (IS.fi)

 

 

 

 

Gervais

 

 

 

 

 

 

6G

 

 

Apart from Zelensky’s nonsensical claim (no. 1001), there’s “For eight years they have been killing us” and “Emmanuel Macron has warned that the West must not humiliate Russia”. And I haven’t seen one person point out that the West CANNOT humiliate Russia.

Zelensky Vows “Full De-Occupation Of Entire Territory” (ZH)

French President Emmanuel Macron has warned that the West must not humiliate Russia if it wants to avoid an unnecessarily prolonged conflict that could spread beyond Ukraine. Since making the remarks days ago, he’s stirred anger among different allies – both in Europe and the US and UK. And he’s again come under fresh criticism and condemnation for the statement. He said last Friday, “We must not humiliate Russia so that the day when the fighting stops we can build an exit ramp through diplomatic means.” As part of the comments he offered France’s role as a “mediating power” in the conflict. This after having reportedly held calls with Russian President Vladimir Putin on pretty much a weekly basis since the invasion began in late February.

Macron has come under criticism from some corners of the EU for even holding the calls where he’s attempted to gain diplomatic concessions, and jump start talks again between Moscow and Kiev. But he hasn’t exactly been alone in his push for a diplomatic solution, given two other populous European nations and their leaders – namely German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi – have done the same. Entirely to be expected, Macron immediately received pushback from the Ukrainians, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba writing on Twitter that “Calls to avoid humiliation of Russia can only humiliate France and every other country that would call for it.” But the Macron comments have stirred anger in the US as well, with Republican hawk Rep. Adam Kinzinger saying “Emmanuel Macron is humiliating himself,” in weekend statements.

“Russia has already been humiliated, and true to their reputation the French are trying to raise the white flag.” Kinzinger, it should be remembered, has gone so far as to push the Biden administration toward erecting a no-fly zone, which would assuredly push the two nuclear armed superpowers into a WW3 scenario confrontation. Meanwhile, at a moment that direct Russia-Ukraine negotiations are essentially dead, but with Turkey still attempting to intervene diplomatically toward the erection of a UN-backed ‘grain corridor’ on the Black Sea, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in media statements Tuesday that even with the latest Russian gains in Donbas his country will not cede any territory for sake of a negotiated settlement.

“We have already lost too many people to simply cede our territory,” Zelensky said in a virtual address to an event hosted by Britain’s Financial Times newspaper. He said neither is stalemate “an option” and that ultimately “We have to achieve a full deoccupation of our entire territory.” Asked specifically about Macron’s ‘don’t humiliate Russia comments’ from days prior, Zelensky reponded: “We are not going to humiliate anyone, we are going to respond in kind.” The Ukrainian leader’s comments came as the last major holdout city of Sievierodonetsk in Luhansk province could soon fall to Russian forces. Zelensky further commented: “I don’t really understand … humiliating Russia. For eight years they have been killing us. What are we talking about here?”

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“..the European success we all know was always based on superb and cheap Russian energy.”

For Europe, From Russia, With Love (Vilches)

The real ultimate EU problem is ´negotiating´ from a position of extreme weakness it has dug itself into and should have always avoided. But at the same time, Europe cannot be anywhere independent from Russia. So the above will affect current and future European production of fuels to fertilizers and everything in between, from kerosene to diesel to gasoline affecting cars, trucks, buses, plastics, pesticides, agricultural, mining and industrial machinery, foodstuffs, water quality and availability, pharmaceuticals, ships, inks, airplanes, polymers, medical and industrial gases, sealing rings & membranes, power transmission, transformer and lube oils, etc., etc., etc.,. Attempting to execute the above under the described terms – and others not mentioned but technically even far more demanding – would be outright engineering and economics madness.

But simultaneously attempting many impossible projects as now required throughout Europe within an ultra-narrow 6-month time-frame and everybody at the same time is sheer nonsensical stupidity, doomed to fail. Why do it then ? Because it´s mandated by the prevailing post-Brexit-US-Anglo-Saxon Russophobia that now hypnotized European leadership foolishly and irreversibly endorses. Henry Kissinger knows it, but do they?. Naturally, the EU leadership has made mistakes all along the 21st century, both technical and political, as fallible humans cannot avoid it. But the captains of the European ship this time around are going a long step further by unbelievably forcing its sailors to run around the deck like a bunch of beheaded chickens with no sense of purpose in rapidly approaching shallow waters in what seems to be a deliberate suicidal attempt.

This has never happened before in recent history as the European success we all know was always based on superb and cheap Russian energy. The plan and policies were led by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder who thought it out bottom-up, top-down, sideways, from left to right, from right to left, crossways, you name it. Until finally in the late 1990s reached the conclusion and convinced the European family of nations that Franz should marry Natasha. And so they remained happily married with many healthy and ambitious children until 2022 whereby the post-Brexit US Anglo-Saxon axis achieved the unthinkable by turning Europe against Russia yet again for the third time in a century as Prof. Michael Hudson has correctly observed. Meanwhile, absurdly enough, Poland is now proposing yet additional sanctions against Russia as if they did any good

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Zelensky has claimed 30,000-40,000 Russian casualties. Nuff said.

Kyiv Keeps US in the Dark on War Realities: NYT (Celente)

The New York Times, citing current and former U.S. officials, published a report Wednesday that American intelligence agencies have “less information than they would like about Ukraine’s operations and possess a far better picture of Russia’s military.” Beth Sanner, a former senior intelligence official, told the paper: “How much do we really know about how Ukraine is doing?” “Can you find a person who will tell you with confidence how many troops has Ukraine lost, how many pieces of equipment has Ukraine lost?” she asked. The Trends Journal has pointed out since the beginning of the conflict that it was nearly impossible to find the number of casualties suffered by Ukrainian troops in Google searches.

But if you were interested in finding out Russia’s war dead, there were dozens of article links. Zelensky vowed to fight for every inch of his country, but how he plans on doing that — without NATO joining the war — is anybody’s guess. The Times reported that the U.S. has a better understanding about Russia’s military’s condition than Ukraine’s. Even Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, told the Senate in May: “We have, in fact, more insight, probably, on the Russian side than we do on the Ukrainian side.” Why did the U.S. agree to send Kyiv advanced rocket systems when it did not have a clear picture about the war’s development, and why has the Biden administration been so positive about Ukraine’s chances against Russia?

Stephen Biddle, a professor of international affairs at Columbia University, told the paper, “I’m not sure it’s in the interest of the American public or Ukrainian public to have Ukrainians be upfront about their losses if the result is it strengthens the Russian war effort. But that means we don’t really know both sides of the story.”

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“To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.”

Is US/NATO (with WEF help) Pushing For A Global South Famine? (Hudson)

U.S. Cold War strategy is not alone in thinking how to benefit from provoking a famine, oil and balance-of-payments crisis. Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum worries that the world is overpopulated – at least with the “wrong kind” of people. As Microsoft philanthropist (the customary euphemism for rentier monopolist) Bill Gates has explained: “Population growth in Africa is a challenge.” His lobbying foundation’s 2018 “Goalkeepers” report warned: “According to U.N. data, Africa is expected to account for more than half of the world’s population growth between 2015 and 2050. Its population is projected to double by 2050,” with “more than 40 percent of world’s extremely poor people … in just two countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria.”

Gates advocates cutting this projected population increase by 30 percent by improving access to birth control and expanding education to “enable more girls and women to stay in school longer, have children later.” But how can that be afforded with this summer’s looming food and oil squeeze on government budgets? South Americans and some Asian countries are subject to the same jump in import prices resulting from NATO’s demands to isolate Russia. JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon recently warned attendees at a Wall Street investor conference that the sanctions will cause a global “economic hurricane.” He echoed the warning by IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva in April that, “To put it simply: we are facing a crisis on top of a crisis.”

Pointing out that the Covid pandemic has been capped by inflation as the war in Ukraine has made matters “much worse, and threatens to further increase inequality” she concluded that: “The economic consequences from the war spread fast and far, to neighbors and beyond, hitting hardest the world’s most vulnerable people. Hundreds of millions of families were already struggling with lower incomes and higher energy and food prices.” The Biden administration blames Russia for “unprovoked aggression.” But it is his administration’s pressure on NATO and other Dollar Area satellites that has blocked Russian exports of grain, oil and gas. But many oil- and food-deficit countries see themselves as the primary victims of “collateral damage” caused by US/NATO pressure.

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I notice Russian players shine in the NHL playoffs, and haven’t seen one word about banning them.

Ukraine to Ban ‘War and Peace’ From Being Taught in Schools (SN)

Leo Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ and other classic historical novels that portray the Russian military in anything other than a negative light will be banned from being taught in Ukrainian schools, it has been announced. “All these will be completely excluded from foreign literature,” first deputy Minister of Education Andrey Vitrenko said in an interview with the TV channel Ukraine 24. “So, for example, ‘War and Peace,’ this will not be studied in Ukraine anymore,” he added. Vitrenko said that his ministry was working on compiling a list of books that will be banned in line with an announcement last month by Kiev’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy that works of literature “promoting Russian propaganda” would be removed from Ukrainian libraries and replaced by Ukrainian books.


Quite how banning a book that is revered the world over and was first published in 1869 will stop Putin’s war machine is anyone’s guess. We have previously documented the increasing intolerance and censorship of all things Russian, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with Vladimir Putin or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The Wimbledon tennis tournament has banned Russian players from competing this year even if they denounce the actions of their own country. There have also been calls for Russian athletes to be subjected to ideological purity tests before they are allowed to compete in international tournaments. In perhaps the most ludicrous example of Russophobia, Siberian cats were banned from competing in international cat competitions.

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“Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power.”

Is Lasting Peace Possible? (Hathaway)

Militarists point to history and say it’s just one war after another. But that’s the history only of our patriarchal civilization. The early matriarchal civilization of south-eastern Europe enjoyed centuries of peace. UCLA anthropologist Marija Gimbutas described the archaeological research in The Living Goddesses. No trace of warfare has been found in excavations of the Minoan, Harappa, and Caral cultures. Many of the Pacific islands were pacifistic. The ancient Vedic civilization of India had meditation techniques that preserved the peace, and those are being revived today to reduce stress in society.

Our society, though, has a deeply entrenched assumption that stress is essential to life. Many of our social and economic structures are based on conflict. Capitalism’s need for continually expanding profits generates stress in all of us. We’ve been indoctrinated to think this is normal and natural, but it’s really pathological. It damages life in ways we can barely perceive because they’re so built into us. We don’t have to live this way. We can reduce the stress humanity suffers under. We can create a society that meets human needs and distributes the world’s resources more evenly. We can live at peace with one another. But that’s going to take basic changes.

These changes threaten the power holders of our society. Since capitalism is a predatory social and economic system, predatory personalities rise to power. They view the world through a lens of aggression. But it’s not merely a view. They really are surrounded by enemy competitors. So they believe this false axiom they are propagating that wars are inevitable. In the past their predecessors defended their power by propagating other nonsense: kings had a divine right to rule us, Blacks were inferior to Whites, women should obey men. We’ve outgrown those humbugs, and we can outgrow this one.

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Aaron Kheriaty, MD: “New levels of systematic mendacity. Sudden Adult Death Syndrome (SADS) is not a thing. These are cardiac deaths. Stop pretending we don’t know why they are elevated. Just f***ing stop. Enough of this. It’s only a mystery if you are blind.”

Healthy Young People Are Dying Unexpectedly From A Mysterious Syndrome (DM)

People aged under 40 are being urged to have their hearts checked because they may potentially be at risk of Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. The syndrome, known as SADS, has been fatal for all kinds of people regardless of whether they maintain a fit and healthy lifestyle. SADS is an ‘umbrella term to describe unexpected deaths in young people’, said The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, most commonly occurring in people under 40 years of age.The term is used when a post-mortem cannot find an obvious cause of death. The US-based SADS Foundation has said that over half of the 4,000 annual SADS deaths of children, teens or young adults have one of the top two warning signs present.Those signs include a family history of a SADS diagnosis or sudden unexplained death of a family member, and fainting or seizure during exercise, or when excited or startled, reported news.com.au.


Last year a 31-year-old woman, Catherine Keane, died in her sleep while living with two friends in Dublin. Her mother Margherita Cummins told the Irish Mirror, ‘They were all working from home so no one really paid attention when Catherine didn’t come down for breakfast.’ ‘They sent her a text at 11.20am and when she didn’t reply, they checked her room and found she had passed. ‘Her friend heard a noise in her room at 3.56am and believes now that is when she died.’ Ms Cummins stated that her daughter ‘went to the gym and walked 10,000 steps every day’. ‘I take some comfort in that she went in her sleep and knew no pain and I’m grateful for that. I always worried about the kids driving in the car but never saw this coming. I never thought I’d ever lose a child in my life,’

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Oh f**king stop already.

Fifth Jab Being Considered In Israel (JPost)

Due to the increase in morbidity, the epidemic treatment team will convene on Wednesday to discuss the provision of a fifth coronavirus vaccine to at-risk populations, KAN reported. According to KAN, a third vaccine for Israelis ages 5 to 12 is also being considered for those who want it. Medical staff would be obligated to receive a second or third dose. Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, who himself had tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday, is currently in quarantine and is working from home, Maariv reported. He had already discussed with senior officials in his ministry about the recent spark in COVID-19 cases.


After the meeting was over, Horowitz urged the general public to “use discretion and wear a mask when necessary, including on public transportation.” He recommended that those elderly or at-risk should wear a mask in closed spaces, “even if it’s not mandatory.” The amount of COVID cases reported yesterday was the highest in Israel in over a month and a half, with approximately 3,731 testing positive, the Health Ministry reported. The Health Ministry is also considering bringing back requirements to self-isolate for those who test positive for the virus. The ministry also intends to examine in the coming days whether the level of immunity in the population has decreased following the morbidity increase, Ynet reported.

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And again: Oh f**king stop already.

Moderna Says Omicron-containing Booster Outperforms Current Vaccine (Stat)

Moderna said Wednesday that using a new version of its Covid-19 vaccine as a booster led to a superior antibody response against the Omicron variant compared to its current shot. The company said it plans to submit its data to the Food and Drug Administration in the coming weeks and that it hopes that the new booster will be available in the late summer. Moderna’s booster, called mRNA1273.214, is a bivalent vaccine, meaning it contains mRNA coding for the spike protein for both the original strain of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the newer Omicron strain. The company had previously released data showing that a bivalent vaccine containing mRNA coding for the spike protein for the original virus and the protein from the Beta variant of SARS-CoV-2 provided better antibody protection than the original vaccine.


Moderna said giving vaccinated volunteers a boost with mRNA1273.214 increased geometric mean titers, a measure of antibody levels, eight-fold. The FDA has been holding public hearings on how to choose which strains of the SARS-CoV-2 virus should be included in booster shots in the fall and who should receive those shots. Another meeting on whether and how the SARS-CoV-2 strain composition of Covid-19 vaccines should be modified is being held on June 28. However, companies have warned that choices will need to be made soon in order for vaccines to be available in the fall. In a statement, Stephane Bancel, Moderna’s CEO, said that the data mean this bivalent vaccine is “our lead candidate for a Fall 2022 booster.”

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Twitter likes the fakes and the bots, it’s all about the numbers.

How Fake Is Twitter’s User Data? (ET)

Over the last several weeks, the perception has grown that Elon Musk will not be the emancipator of Twitter, freeing it finally from its mysterious algorithms that throttle, block, and ban perfectly wonderful accounts solely based on the political vendetta of employees and management. It’s said that he has cold feet, as if Elon’s demand for better data is purely a cover for emotional doubt. That’s simply not true. What he has intuited—that Twitter underreports the sheer fake accounts and bot armies that use its platform—could in fact become another scandal for our age. Twitter says it’s only 5 percent. Elon has crowd-sourced the question and suspects it is closer to 20 percent. The truth is out there, but Twitter is not forthcoming. Why might this be?

Here is where we get to the core of the issue: the reach data provided by these companies—this pertains not only to Twitter but to hundreds of thousands of sites—form the basis of its pricing structure for advertisers and therefore drive the fundamentals of the business model. The business model is that these companies sell your content—which you provide because you want your views known—to advertisers so that they can sell to you. Advertisers are charged for access to your brain based on an overall estimate of how many users are on the platform and how broad is the reach. Accuracy is of huge importance here. But accuracy has not exactly defined the way these companies have long operated. The data are subject to manipulation in the extreme.

For example, Twitter has proven to be absolutely awful at policing the number of fake accounts that pretend to be some famous person with large followers. One might suspect that getting rid of such accounts should be part of Twitter’s main focus. I’ve dealt with it for years and spent far too much time getting rid of them. Who has such time? It’s ridiculous. But have a look at this problem which has been going on for many weeks now. Brownstone’s Martin Kulldorff has a famous Twitter account but I can easily search his name which turns up many fake accounts. Notice the slightly different spellings. This isn’t rocket science! Does Twitter do anything about it? Not in many weeks.

If this is any indication of the underlying realities, Twitter has a very big problem. Instead of focusing its energies on censoring good accounts, it might have applied its energies to solving a problem that affects all users.And yet there is more at stake. Consider that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has initiated an investigation into Twitter. If the company has falsely reported its real user base, that stands in violation of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Paxton has given the company until June 27, 2022, to produce evidence for how it calculates the numbers it has routinely touted to advertisers. We’ll see. It will probably end up in court.

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The full firehose. But Musk should first check how much of the data has been manipulated.

Twitter Will Reportedly Give Its Full Data Stream To Elon Musk (Eng.)

Twitter could comply with Elon Musk’s demand for more data about its users as soon as this week. According to The Washington Post, the company plans to give the billionaire full access to its full “firehose,” an internal database that includes details on the more than 500 million tweets posted to the service every day. In addition to representing a real-time record of what’s happening on Twitter at any moment, the trove includes device data and information about the accounts that access the platform. After Twitter accepted Musk’s $44 billion buyout offer in April, the billionaire announced in May the deal was “temporarily on hold” over concerns he had about fake accounts.

Twitter has consistently claimed that bots represent less than five percent of its daily users, a number Musk says he wants to confirm before moving forward with the acquisition. On Monday, Musk accused the company of committing a “material breach” of the merger agreement by allegedly refusing to disclose enough information about fake accounts. At the time, Twitter said it would “continue to cooperatively share information” with Musk as it worked toward completing the transaction. “We believe this agreement is in the best interest of all shareholders,” the company told The Post, reiterating its statement from Monday. “We intend to close the transaction and enforce the merger agreement at the agreed price and terms.”

How many bots and fake accounts there are on Twitter is important to Musk because that number would have a significant impact on his ability to monetize the platform through ads. Musk has committed about $33 billion of his personal wealth to buy the company, and he’s required to go through with the deal unless he can show Twitter misled him or that its value has changed.

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“..100% certainty that Hunter Biden “was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data.”

168,000 Deleted Files Recovered From Hunter Biden’s Laptop (WE)

A cyber forensics expert commissioned by the Washington Examiner recovered over 168,000 deleted files from a copy of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop. Many of the deleted files were system files, application files, or duplicates of user files stored elsewhere on the laptop. Some of the recovered data, however, shed light on his financial dealings in 2018 and early 2019, as well as his personal dealings during that time frame. Also recovered from the drive were deleted pictures of government ID cards for two individuals linked to President Joe Biden’s son. Konstantinos “Gus” Dimitrelos, a former Secret Service agent who has testified in over 100 classified, criminal, and civil matters, retrieved the deleted files from unallocated space on the hard drive using a technique called data carving.

The existence of recoverable deleted user files adds another layer of authenticity to the hard drive, Dimitrelos said. “In order for user-created data — including personal photographs, bank records, invoices, business records, third-party data such as the driver’s licenses of other persons, chat conversations, and medical records, as examples — to exist within the unallocated hard drive space, the computer user would have had to manually delete the files,” Dimitrelos said. “Any Robert Hunter Biden recovered files in unallocated space was there as a result of deletions by the user ‘roberthunter.’” Dimitrelos has examined the Washington Examiner’s copy of the hard drive and determined with 100% certainty that Hunter Biden “was the only person responsible for the activity on this hard drive and all of its stored data.”

Many of the recovered user files were attachments to text messages that Hunter Biden sent to or received from his associates. The text messages contain markers indicating that an attachment was deleted. One of the recovered text attachments was a selfie he took in which he can be seen holding a vape pen. He attached the photo to a message sent to an unknown person Jan. 30, 2019. “That’s the weed vape pen that a Russian Escort left in my room before I came here this time,” Hunter Biden texted them.

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“..the doctor who prescribes hormones to children asked Walsh whether chickens cry..”

What is a Woman? (Laura Dodsworth)

It turns out that the best way to disrupt transgender ideology is to ask one simple question: what is a woman? Creator Matt Walsh asked each contributor the same question with purist focus in this brilliant and horrifying new film. The obstructions, circular reasoning and threats to walk off the set revealed that gender is like “a jenga tower”, as Walsh says. I spoke to Walsh about the film just a few days after its release. It has gone down a storm and Walsh was busy fielding interviews. He was also cautious; a publicist was off camera in our video call, and they recorded the interview. I don’t blame them for wanting to keep the record straight. What is a woman? is wildly controversial and successful, and that attracts peevish and disingenuous reviewers.

Transgender ideology is defeatingly complex and ever-shifting. The film’s success lies in its determined pursuit of the answer to one question. I asked Walsh why he focussed on this truth, whereas other activists have honed in on particular aspects, such as feminists arguing for women’s sex-based spaces and rights. “Philosophically it’s the best way to approach this issue,” he replied. “There are practical reasons why rights matter. I want to protect the rights of women and children, all those things matter and I care about them too. But the first thing is that it’s not true. That’s the important thing, first and foremost. Then we can establish all those other things. The loss of rights can be tackled after truth. Trans activists will ask why you care so much about what a woman is, but that’s sleight of hand.”

There was a palpable difference between the interviewees who were prepared to offer honest answers and those who would not. The first set seemed at ease. The trans man, in particular, was brutally raw, hiding nothing. In contrast, those who couldn’t answer the question seemed different – their body language was off, their answers evasive. They seemed to be thinking ahead, denial and defence almost visible on the surface, while cogs whirred just below. The social sciences professor replied with fallacious logic. In one of the more bizarre moments, the doctor who prescribes hormones to children asked Walsh whether chickens cry. A trans woman and a congressman flounced off camera. They didn’t just deny the simple biological truth (that a woman is an adult human female), they denied the concept of truth itself. The professor asserted that “invoking the word truth was condescending”.

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Google translate from Finnish.

This Is What Erdogan Promised (IS.fi)

The NATO process in Finland and Sweden has been at a standstill for three weeks due to opposition from Turkey. Not even NATO accession talks have been allowed to begin. There have been charges against Turkey, especially in Sweden. Turkey launched its publicity campaign on 13 May, five days before Finland and Sweden applied for membership in Brussels. “The Nordic countries are like guest houses for terrorist organizations,” said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan . Turkey’s violent drumming has raised the question of whether something went wrong in Finland’s diplomatic efforts in the spring. How did Turkey surprise Finland?

In an interview with IS, the president of the Republic Sauli Niinistö said that there was no reason to doubt Turkey’s position before Erdogan’s sharp exits. According to Niinistö, in a telephone conversation on 4 April, Erdogan clearly expressed his support for Finland’s efforts. – At the end of a rather long discussion, he said that you are applying for NATO membership, we will look at it favorably, we will assess it favorably , Niinistö says. Should the speeches have been treated with greater caution? – It is quite difficult to get started because it is not true if something is repeatedly reassured not only to me but also to our Foreign Minister and even to the Secretary General of NATO. It would have been difficult to justify a solution that we are not moving forward because Turkey’s positive position is not correct or we suspect it is not. Should this be the way to go? No.

Is it possible that there have been differences of interpretation between Finland and Turkey? – There is no possibility of misunderstanding. Besides, the continuation of the April 4 call is a bit ambitious. On 5 May, Foreign Minister [ Pekka Haavisto ] confirmed that he had a discussion with Turkish Foreign Minister [ Mevlüt ] Cavusoglu and stated that there were no problems. And NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg issued a similar statement on behalf of NATO in early May. – If there was still a clear perception in NATO on May 5 that there are no problems, then we have to believe it. That fact raises this issue more on the NATO table than on our table.

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Gonzalo: Whatever remains

 

 

 

 

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

Apr 072022
 


Edward Hopper The Sheridan Theatre 1937

 

US Is Using Intel To Fight An Info War With Russia (NBC)
Video Appears To Show Ukrainian Soldiers Executing Russian Soldiers – NY Times (BI)
UK Delays Tariffs On Russian Whitefish (Pol.eu)
America’s Largest Farm Cooperative Warns Sanctions May Spark Fertilizer Shortages (ZH)
US Warns India Faces Significant Long-Term Costs If It Aligns With Russia (ZH)
Whistleblower To Release 450 GB Of Deleted Files From Hunter’s Laptop (DM)
Psaki Says Joe Biden And His Son Hunter ‘Were Not Office Mates’ (Fox)
President Macron Says He is “Opposed to Self-Defense” (SN)
‘Pushed to the Brink of Collapse’: Chaos Behind Shanghai Lockdown Measures (ET)
WHO Will Assume Total Control Of Future Pandemics (Kirsch)
‘Mandatory Vaccination’ For All Germans Over 60 Expected To Pass (ZH)
The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget (Suzy Weiss)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scott Ritter was banned from Twitter yesterday, and then reinstated.

Ukraine War Could Have Been Avoided, but Here’s Why Putin Will Achieve His Goals

 

 

US intel is very sophisticated and very credible.

US Is Using Intel To Fight An Info War With Russia (NBC)

It was an attention-grabbing assertion that made headlines around the world: U.S. officials said they had indications suggesting Russia might be preparing to use chemical agents in Ukraine. President Joe Biden later said it publicly. But three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. It’s one of a string of examples of the Biden administration’s breaking with recent precedent by deploying declassified intelligence as part of an information war against Russia. The administration has done so even when the intelligence wasn’t rock solid, officials said, to keep Russian President Vladimir Putin off balance.

Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods. Observers of all stripes have called it a bold and so far successful strategy — although not one without risks. “It’s the most amazing display of intelligence as an instrument of state power that I have seen or that I’ve heard of since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” said Tim Weiner, the author of a 2006 history of the CIA and 2020’s “The Folly and the Glory,” a look at the U.S.-Russia rivalry over decades. “It has certainly blunted and defused the disinformation weaponry of the Kremlin.”

Four days before the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the U.S. publicized spy plane photos to show the Soviet Union had deployed nuclear missiles not far from Florida’s coast. The Biden administration began releasing reams of intelligence about what it said were Putin’s plans and intentions even before the invasion of Ukraine began. Just this week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan stood at the White House podium and read out what officials said was more declassified intelligence, asserting that Russia’s pullout from areas around Kyiv wasn’t a retreat but a strategic redeployment that signals a significant assault on eastern and southern Ukraine, one that U.S. officials believe could be a protracted and bloody fight. The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign, “undermine Moscow’s propaganda and prevent Russia from defining how the war is perceived in the world,” said a Western government official familiar with the strategy.

Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the accuracy of the information wasn’t high. Sometimes it has used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just “trying to get inside Putin’s head.” Some officials believe, however, that trying to get into Putin’s head is a meaningless exercise, because he will do what he wants regardless. After this story was published, a U.S. official told NBC News that “the U.S. government’s effort to strategically downgrade intelligence to share with allies and the public is underpinned by a rigorous review process by the National Security Council and the Intelligence Community to validate the quality of the information and protect sources and methods.” The official added that “we only approve the release of intelligence if we are confident those two requirements are met.”

US intel

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”Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said it was “precise work” by Ukrainian troops.”

Video Appears To Show Ukrainian Soldiers Executing Russian Soldiers – NY Times (BI)

Video posted on Telegram Monday appears to show Ukrainian soldiers killing captured Russian troops in a village near Kyiv, according to a report from The New York Times. The video was verified by The Times, however, the outlet decided not to publish it due to its graphic nature. Per The Times it shows a Ukrainian soldier shooting a Russian soldier three times while another man says “he’s still alive. Film these marauders. Look, he’s still alive. He’s gasping.” The video, The Times reported, also shows at least three other Russian soldiers dead near the victim — identified by white armbands commonly worn by Russian troops. One of the soldiers has an obvious head wound and his hands are tied behind his back, according to the report from The Times.

The soldiers are surrounded by equipment and are laying on the road near a BMD-2 — an infantry vehicle used by Russia’s airborne units, according to military scholar Rob Lee. In the video, which was not independently verified by Insider, Ukrainian soldiers are identifiable by their blue armbands and repeat “glory to Ukraine” but their unit is unclear. A Ukrainian news agency said the ambush was the work of the “Georgian Legion” a group of Georgian volunteers that formed in 2014 to fight for Ukraine, according to The Times report.

The video was filmed north of the village of Dmytrivka, about seven miles southwest of Bucha, according to the Times report. Earlier this week, graphic videos emerged of at least 300 civilians killed in Bucha during Russia’s occupation of the city. Ukrainian officials say they were attacked as Russian troops were retreating. Ukrainian forces ambushed Russian troops around March 30, according to the Times report. In a tweet, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said it was “precise work” by Ukrainian troops.

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What the sanctions are really worth.

UK Delays Tariffs On Russian Whitefish (Pol.eu)

Plans to impose sanctions on Russian whitefish have been postponed by the U.K. government amid fears over the impact on Britain’s seafood industry. Whitefish was among the Russian exports set to be slapped with a 35 percent tariff by the U.K. in response to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. A U.K. government official said the sanctions have been “delayed while we sort some technicalities,” but stressed that “we are totally committed to them.” Any suggestion the plans had been dropped entirely was “totally untrue,” the official added. Roughly 30 percent of the U.K.’s whitefish originates from Russia, which controls between 40 to 45 percent of the global supply, according to industry body Seafish.


When the measure was first announced, Britain’s seafood processing industry and struggling fish and chip shops, which rely on the supply of Russian whitefish including cod, said they feared price rises as a result of the sanctions could squeeze their businesses. Andrew Crook, president of the National Federation of Fish Friers, said: “I think government wants more time to investigate the impact of sanctions on whitefish so have just held off for the time being. “We of course support any measures they deem suitable to bring the conflict to a speedier conclusion.” The whitefish sanctions were announced on March 15. However, unlike other Russian products targeted including cereal, cement and fertilizer, the tariffs were not imposed on whitefish when they came into force on March 24, according to Seafish, a public body that supports the U.K.’s seafood industry.

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It’s already done. Planting season is now.

America’s Largest Farm Cooperative Warns Sanctions May Spark Fertilizer Shortages (ZH)

America’s largest farmer cooperative sounded the alarm Wednesday about possible disruptions of fertilizer supplies from Russia due to Western sanctions on Moscow. CHS Inc., the largest agricultural cooperative in the US, said in an SEC filing that it’s concerned about obtaining Russian fertilizer because of sanctions making it “more expensive and difficult to do business with Russia.” CHS warned that sanctions could “cause delays with respect to, or prevent, shipments of fertilizer to us, cause inflationary pressures on and impact our ability to purchase fertilizer, disrupt the execution of banking transactions with certain Russian financial institutions and result in volatility in foreign exchange rates and interest rates, all of which could have a material adverse effect on our business and operations.”

The cooperative said it holds no operations in Russia. However, it has $30 million in grain inventories sitting in silos in Ukraine and will have to take an “impairment charge” because of its inability to access those stockpiles. CHS warns there’s a risk the conflict in Ukraine “could lead to a much larger conflict and/or additional sanctions imposed by the United States government and other governments that restrict business with specific persons, organizations or countries or with respect to certain products or services.” And said if such an event did occur, it would wreck more global supply chains and “could materially adversely affect our business operations and financial performance.” For some context, Russia is one of the world’s largest fertilizer exports. Countries already afflicted by food insecurity, such as emerging market economies, will experience some of the first fertilizer and food shortages first. By the way, violent inflation protests are already beginning in Peru.

Famine
https://twitter.com/i/status/1511921482275999754

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The US is blind to its loss of power. Russia, India, the UAE, Brazil and Indonesia, China, that’s way more people than the US can strong-arm in 2022.

US Warns India Faces Significant Long-Term Costs If It Aligns With Russia (ZH)

Given that a handful of countries that rank among the top largest economies in the world have thus far been reluctant to firmly condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this could prove the significant monkey wrench in US-EU plans to severely isolate and wreak havoc on global Russian exports. Among these include the obvious – China, but also there’s India, the UAE, Brazil and Indonesia. India for example – standing just behind the UK as the 6th largest economy – remains the the single largest buyer of Russian weapons. India is also reportedly seeking more discounted Russian oil, in what looks to be a potential move away from Saudi crude. In early March, The New York Times noted that India was among those countries dependent on many Russian imports that’s attempting to “stay above the fray”.

“When India abstained from a United Nations vote and the chorus of Western condemnation against the Ukraine invasion, it appeared to be taking sides: offering tacit support for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,” the Times emphasized previously. And now Washington is putting New Delhi on notice that it faces ‘significant costs’ should it become aligned with Russia, and as a major export destination allowing Putin to side-step sanctions effects. The Biden administraiton’s Director of the National Economic Council of the United States Brian Deese has said the US remains “disappointed” with aspects of the Indian government’s reaction to the Ukraine crisis. “There are certainly areas where we have been disappointed by both China and India’s decisions, in the context of the invasion,” he said a Wednesday event in D.C.

He was cited as saying in Bloomberg: The US has told India that the consequences of a “more explicit strategic alignment” with Moscow would be “significant and long-term,” he said. India has so far rejected falling in line with the West’s anti-Russia sanctions, instead continuing to import Russian oil, which remains at an estimated 2% of its total oil imports.

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‘Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.’

Whistleblower To Release 450 GB Of Deleted Files From Hunter’s Laptop (DM)

The source who distributed Hunter Biden’s laptop to congressmen and media has fled the US to Switzerland, saying he fears retaliation from the Biden administration. Jack Maxey gave DailyMail.com a copy of the hard drive from Hunter’s abandoned laptop in the spring of 2021. He also gave copies and material from it to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Senator Chuck Grassley in his role as ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee – but he claims they all sat on it for months. For the past two weeks, Maxey has been in hiding in Zurich, working with IT experts to dig out more data from the ‘laptop from hell’. Maxey, a former co-host of ex-Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast the War Room, claims he and his colleagues have found ‘450 gigabytes of deleted material’ including 80,000 images and videos and more than 120,000 archived emails.

He said he intends to post them all online in a searchable database in the coming weeks. Hunter abandoned his laptop at a Delaware computer store in 2019. The owner, John Mac Isaac, gave a copy to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who passed it on to Maxey. ‘I came here so that we could do a forensic examination of Hunter’s laptop safely in a country that still respects human liberty and the ideals of liberal democratic principles,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘I do not believe this would have been possible inside the United States. We had numerous attempts on us from trying to do things like this there.’ Maxey said that after contacting DailyMail.com about the laptop last year, black suburban SUVs appeared outside his house, and former US intelligence officer friends he shared copies with told him they received strange calls.

‘I showed this to a friend of mine in desperation in February [2021] because nobody would listen to me. No news organizations would take it. In fact, the very first major news organization to take it was the Daily Mail,’ he said. ‘Very dear friends of mine, the sharp tip of the spear, were making welfare calls to me every day, basically to see if I was still alive.’

Darryl Cooper

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She’s openly calling Hunter a liar now. Shouldn’t Joe stand up for “the smartest man I know”?

And also:

“In the email, Hunter Biden also requests keys for Gongwen Dong, whom he describes as an “emissary” for Ye Jianming — the chairman of CEFC Chinese Energy Co.”

Psaki Says Joe Biden And His Son Hunter ‘Were Not Office Mates’ (Fox)

White House press secretary Jen Psaki denied on Wednesday previous reports that claimed Hunter Biden and his father, President Biden, were “office mates.” Asked by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy about “evidence that the president, at one point, was office mates with Hunter and his brother Jim here in D.C.,” Psaki said the reports were “not accurate.” Hunter Biden requested in 2017 that keys be made for his new “office mates,” listing his father, Jill Biden, and his uncle Jim Biden, for space he planned to share with an “emissary” for a chairman of a Chinese energy company, according to an email obtained by Fox News.


A Sept. 20, 2017 email obtained by Fox News shows Hunter requesting keys for Joe and Jill Biden, along with Jim Biden, for space he planned to share with an “emissary” for a chairman of a Chinese energy company. The email was sent to the general manager, Cecilia Browning, at the House of Sweden — a building in Washington, D.C., that contains multiple office suites and a number of embassies. “Please have keys made available for new office mates: Joe Biden, Jill Biden, Jim Biden,” said the email, with the subject “507.” In the email, Hunter Biden also requests keys for Gongwen Dong, whom he describes as an “emissary” for Ye Jianming — the chairman of CEFC Chinese Energy Co.

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“..because otherwise the country becomes the Wild West..”

Actually, that is what it is without self-defense…

Idiot.

President Macron Says He is “Opposed to Self-Defense” (SN)

After a farmer was charged with murder for shooting a man after four burglars broke into his home, French President Emmanuel Macron said people should not have the right to self-defense. Yes, really. “According to the initial investigation, the farmer fired twice with a large caliber rifle at a group of four burglars, killing one of them. The self-defense shooting took place last Friday, between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., and the man was alone with his 3-year-old daughter at the time,” reports Remix News. However, Macron responded to the story by asserting that the 35-year-old farmer had no right to defend himself or his daughter in such a manner. “Everyone must be safe, and the public authorities have to ensure it,” Macron told Europe 1.


“But I am opposed to self-defense. It’s very clear and undisputable because otherwise the country becomes the Wild West. And I don’t want a country where weapons proliferate and where we consider that it’s up to the citizens to defend themselves,” said Macron. Presumably, the farmer should have just allowed the four burglars to ransack his home and potentially harm his young daughter without doing anything to intervene. Macron insisted that the farmer should have called the police, who in many areas of France are already stretched to the limit thanks to criminal gangs of migrants youths being in a perpetual state of war with them. “I’m not going to judge this news. I convey the rules,” said Macron, whose weak record on security and crime is under scrutiny.

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“Let me reiterate, do not bother checking your health cloud, it’s all a negative result. Only we will notify you when you have tested positive.” The caller responded, “So what we see is all fake?” She said, “That’s right.”

‘Pushed to the Brink of Collapse’: Chaos Behind Shanghai Lockdown Measures (ET)

While Shanghai continues its lockdown and massive PCR testing campaign as COVID-19 surges through the city, a CDC expert’s complaint about chaotic PCR test reports that have confused people was recently exposed online. Shanghai CDC issued a notice demanding staff answer public inquiries “in line with the policy.” There have been complaints about the conflicting PCR test results on Chinese social media because people receive a negative test result on their cell phones but then receive a positive test result from the CDC. Shanghai adopted the Healthcare Cloud app as its integrated Internet and Healthcare services platform. Locals register through the app for a PCR test and receive the test result on their cell phones.

However, many people received a negative test notice via the app but still were then notified by CDC that they had tested positive and were thus subject to quarantine. Complaints have flooded the Shanghai CDC hotline. A recently leaked recording of a CDC expert responding to a caller revealed how the app has been problematic, how overloaded health workers have been stymied by a lack of transparency in pandemic prevention, and how the pandemic has become a political issue. In the recording, the expert said, “We have received hundreds of calls every day, but our jobs are epidemiological investigations. We can’t solve your problem.” She said, “Let me tell you the facts: There’s no ward, the quarantine sites are filled, and there’s no ambulance.”

A male was heard complaining, “But we have no way to address our issue, even Weibo is blocked.” The expert said, “I have brought this up too many times; as an expert, I have suggested that the mild to no symptom patients stay at home. Does anyone listen? No!” She continued, “Let me reiterate, do not bother checking your health cloud, it’s all a negative result. Only we will notify you when you have tested positive.” The caller responded, “So what we see is all fake?” She said, “That’s right.”

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No, they won’t. Wanna bet?

WHO Will Assume Total Control Of Future Pandemics (Kirsch)

Thanks to Mike Yeadon for alerting me to this. Here’s Mike’s message to me (excerpt): “Steve, I’ve heard about this from half a dozen sources & I’m sorry to say that the concerns expressed are wholly justified. It’s a mad idea, but since certain individuals & nations have pretty much taken over the WHO, I think it’s a certainty that, if this new treaty gets signed, within a few years at most, a “public health emergency of International concern” will be declared, and all currently sovereign nations will become controlled subsidiaries of WHO. … No government should even have the power to throw their country over to a third party. If that happened, they’d never give it back. U.K. parliament signed up to emergency powers on the occasion of the first lockdown over two years ago. That temporary bill has never been repealed. We have no rights whatsoever if they decide we don’t. This is the main reason we emigrated.

Here’s the best practical reason not to sign such a treaty, aside from its anti-democratic central problem: Imagine there’s a new pathogen spreading across the world. Nobody, anywhere, knows what the best response should be. By definition it’s not known. History teaches us that we alight most rapidly upon probable best courses of action, not from modeling, but from empirical evidence. Running a large number of experiments, based on the smartest public health, medical & scientific brains, will quickly tell us what kinds of responses are helpful & which are not. Maintaining very good communication makes sure lessons learned are shared quickly. The worst conceivable response would be to place the decision making power in the hands of a single body. They’ll likely run one experiment. We’ll never learn the counterfactual. On this basis, I don’t even understand why anyone would fall for the idiotic notion that letting WHO have the controls would be a great idea. Even if they were honest & competent.

Please let me know if I can help in any way.

Best wishes

Mike

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Mandatory adverse effects.

‘Mandatory Vaccination’ For All Germans Over 60 Expected To Pass (ZH)

The COVID pandemic has largely subsided in Europe (although health authorities have warned about an uptick in cases caused by subvariants and hybrid variants of the omicron strain). But this hasn’t stopped German lawmakers from pushing for a new law that would legally require people age 60 and older to be vaccinated. But that’s not all. The deal struck by members of Germany’s ruling “stop sign” coalition, which includes Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, the Greens and the ‘classical liberal’ Free Democrats, also includes an option for making COVID shots mandatory for everybody age 18 and older. That second provision will depend on how the next wave of the pandemic develops during the fall, according to Bloomberg, which cited a local report.


According to other provisions in the proposed law, the government would initially try to “encourage” the unvaccinated to voluntary submit to inoculation (Germany still has millions of unvaccinated citizens, not unlike the US). Fortunately, even if the proposal becomes a law (it’s due for a vote on Thursday), it will also include provisions that would reverse the situation if enough people receive their COVID shots voluntarily before the summer. Lawmakers told Bloomberg that the goal of the proposal is “effective prevention.” “We are united by the goal of effective prevention through the highest possible level of basic immunity for all adults for the fall, because in this way we can prevent the health system from being overwhelmed,” they added. Germany is still recording more than 200,000 cases and more than 300 deaths from the virus on most days. But with more than 75% of its population vaccinated, the pressure on the country’s health-care system has significantly lessened since the depths of the pandemic.

UK jab effectiveness

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“it’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later, and the world has moved on but they haven’t.”

The Teen Girls Aren’t Going to Forget (Suzy Weiss)

Lily May Holland, 16, remembers the long, lonely days during lockdown when her parents, both doctors, were at work. She’d watch “Gilmore Girls” and “Gossip Girl” and “Grey’s Anatomy” over and over. She stopped eating and started doing Chloe Ting workouts. “I’d have gum and a smoothie all day,” she said. They lived in the sticks north of Charlottesville, Virginia, on a dirt road between farms and trailer parks and the occasional Baptist church, and she didn’t have a license, so she couldn’t go anywhere or meet any friends. Teachers would post assignments online, but it was like—who cared? Everything happened in isolation, like they were atoms. “I would’ve gone to parties, and me and my friends were planning to go to concerts, and homecoming,” Lily said. “I had crushes freshman year. But all that fell away.”

Teenagers need a social life. Every single study and report and piece of data tells us so. But we don’t need studies to tell us what we all already know. Ask yourself: What would it have been like if you had spent your thirteenth year in solitude? It was more than a year, actually. Millions of American kids had gone a year-and-a-half mostly alone. And every single girl I spoke to said the same thing about the experience: They felt like they were sinking, or being swallowed up. So it almost seemed like an understatement when, in December 2021, the Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, said the effect of the lockdowns had been “devastating” for young people’s mental health. “Usually, kids would be learning to disobey their parents and stay out late and figure out the consequences, but there was just none of that,” said Regine Galanti, a clinical psychologist in New York who specializes in adolescents with anxiety disorders.

The impact of all that emptiness—the zig-zagging from one hazy, blue-ish screen to another and then to another—was starting to come into focus, and it was scary. Lily said that, at some point mid-lockdown, she got sick of communicating with other human beings via iPhone. So then she stopped communicating at all. Galanti said, “It’s almost like a volcano that we set ourselves up for.”It was an unprecedented volcano. In the past, Earth-shaking events—the Great Depression, World War II, Vietnam—had forced kids to grow up. Teenagers got jobs or were deployed overseas, and when they came back they settled down and had kids or left home and fled to the big city. The point is that they started their lives.

Covid did the opposite. Instead of nudging young people out the door, it anchored them to their parents, to their bedrooms and to their screens. And now that the madness is finally ebbing, they’re unsure how to proceed. Galanti said, “it’s like a sci-fi show where people went to sleep and woke up two years later, and the world has moved on but they haven’t.”

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Tsernigov

 

 

Support the Automatic Earth in virustime with Paypal, Bitcoin and Patreon.

 

 

 

Mar 192022
 


Salvador Dali Eggs on the plate (without the plate) 1932

 

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)
The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)
All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)
Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)
Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)
NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)
The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)
How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)
Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)
Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)
“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)
UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)
Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)
CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)
Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

 

 


Fresco in Prague, dedicated to the children of Ukraine

 

 

Hungry people are dangerous

 

 

 

 

Rickards

 

 

Safe and effective

 

 

“How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly?”

Shadows Within Shadows (Jim Kunstler)

The regime behind “Joe Biden” appears to relish the prospect of dragging out this crisis as long as possible, despite the fact that we have about zero national interest in the fate of Ukraine, except perhaps for our fears about the dark secrets that reside there…. Amid an all-out campaign of contrived World War Three hysteria, our country aims to send about $14-billion in aid to Ukraine post-haste, including more javelin anti-tank missiles and weapons described as “kamikaze drones,” posing some thorny questions for curious observers. How do we propose to get these things into Ukraine? Fly the stuff in on USAF C-17 Globemaster transport planes? To what airfield, exactly? And with what assurance that they can make delivery without encountering, shall we say, induced mechanical failure before landing?

Drive the weapons across the border from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, or Moldova? Do you not suppose that Russia has satellite surveillance of the limited number of road crossings along that frontier, and will be watching for truck convoys. More likely, that dollar number and the weaponry talk are fantasies intended to propitiate the roughly thirty percent of Americans whom, pollsters report, are avid for an apocalyptic nuclear showdown with Russia. Thirty percent, by the way, is the estimate by psychologists of any given population susceptible to mass formation psychosis — the transfiguration of anxiety-and-anomie-driven persons from something like harmless grasshoppers into ravaging human locusts.

That group derangement phenomenon has been managed artfully by America’s Deep State in recent years starting with the Russia Collusion hoax against the alleged monsterdom of Mr. Trump, then shifted to the frenzy around Covid-19 virus, with all its sickening rituals of obedience and submission, and now segued seamlessly to the melodrama of Vladimir Putin cast as King Kong manhandling Fay Wray as personified by Ukraine. Readers assure me that Russia is “getting its ass kicked” in that sore-beset, yawning expanse of wheat and mud that has been, one way or another, a domain of Russia longer than the USA has been nation — except the past thirty-odd years when it has been a playground for homegrown oligarch-looters, US State Department and CIA gamesters, and grift-seeking rogues such as Mr. Hunter R. Biden and the relatives of John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi.

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Three articles on the USD. I still tend to side with No. 3, I don’t see what could replace the dollar. Certainly not the yuan, not as long as Xi demands full control of it.. There’s gold, and bitcoin, and SDR, and then maybe a fiat basket of currencies. Whatever comes, it will take a long time.

The Dominance Of The US Dollar Is Fading Right Before Our Eyes (QTR)

Saudi Arabia, which is a nation of major consequence economically due to its significant oil and gas reserves, has reportedly embraced the idea of accepting Yuan instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales. Not unlike Russia and China’s plans to de-dollarize, that date back nearly a decade, the Saudis have been considering this idea for six years already. And not unlike Russia and China’s new economic tie-up, the catalyst for speeding up the process has been U.S. foreign policy: Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.

The talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom, the people said. The consideration by Saudi Arabia is consequential. It shows that other nations, when forced to choose sides between the U.S. and its foes, don’t feel obligated to commit to the U.S. dollar, further undermining the world’s perception about the dollar’s strength. Not unlike Russia, Saudi Arabia is a country that, regardless of how much its currency may “devalue” versus a fiat basket of currencies, is still backed by finite resources. This gives the country and its currency intrinsic strength. Russia seems to understand this. In fact, just this morning, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, likely alluding to this fact, said that economic sanctions against Russia make the country “stronger”.

Saudi Arabia is now another serious name on the list of contenders who have the currency bite to back up the economic rhetoric bark of challenging the dollar. As The Wall Street Journal notes, the Saudis have “traded oil exclusively in dollars since 1974, in a deal with the Nixon administration that included security guarantees for the kingdom.” The U.S. dollar’s ties to oil have been crucial in helping prop up the currency’s demand globally. These ties have also helped drum up the psychological buy-in necessary for the world to collectively accept that “the next guy” is going to want their U.S. dollars. But given the alliance between Russia and China – and the newfound alliance between Saudi Arabia and China – it looks as though that confidence game might be coming to an end right before our very eyes.

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Love Pepe, but this does’t sound credible.

All That Glitters Is Not Necessarily Russian Gold (Escobar)

The Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and China are starting to design a new monetary and financial system bypassing the U.S. dollar, supervised by Sergei Glazyev and intended to compete with the Bretton Woods system. Saudi Arabia – perpetrator of bombing, famine and genocide in Yemen, weaponized by U.S., UK and EU – is advancing the coming of the petroyuan. India – third largest importer of oil in the world – is about to sign a mega-contract to buy oil from Russia with a huge discount and using a ruble-rupee mechanism. Riyadh’s oil exports amount to roughly $170 billion a year. China buys 17% of it, compared to 21% for Japan, 15% for the U.S., 12% for India and roughly 10% for the EU. The U.S. and its vassals – Japan, South Korea, EU – will remain within the petrodollar sphere. India, just like China, may not.

Sanction blowback is on the offense. Even a market/casino capitalism darling such as uber-nerd Credit Suisse strategist Zoltan Poznar, formerly with the NY Fed, IMF and Treasury Dept., has been forced to admit, in an analytical note: “If you think that the West can develop sanctions that will maximize the pain for Russia by minimizing the risks of financial stability and price stability for the West, then you can also trust unicorns.” Unicorns are a trademark of the massive NATOstan psyops apparatus, lavishly illustrated by the staged, completely fake “summit” in Kiev between Comedian Ze and the Prime Ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, thoroughly debunked by John Helmer and Polish sources.

Poznar, a realist, hinted in fact at the ritual burial of the financial chapter of the “rules-based international order” in place since the early Cold War years: “After the end of this war ‘money’ “will never be the same”. Especially when the Hegemon demonstrates its “rules” by encroaching on other people’s money. And that configures the central tenet of 21st century martial geopolitics as monetary/ideological. The world, especially the Global South, will have to decide whether “money” is represented by the virtual, turbo-charged casino privileged by the Americans or by real, tangible assets such as energy sources. A bipolar financial world – U.S. dollar vs. yuan – is at hand.

There’s no surefire evidence – yet. But the Kremlin may have certainly gamed that by using Russia’s foreign reserves as bait, likely to be frozen by sanctions, the end result could be the smashing of the petrodollar. After all the overwhelming majority of the Global South by now has fully understood that the backed-by-nothing U.S. dollar as “money” – according to Poznar – is absolutely untrustworthy. If that’s the case, talk about a Putin ippon from hell.

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Thread.

“..would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.”

Dollar Dominance Is Going To Be With Us For Decades To Come (Fickling)

I regularly scoff about the wild claims about the yuan replacing the dollar as a global currency. But every time I look at the data I’m still *amazed* at just how irrelevant the yuan is: Banks *in China itself* still use the greenback for more than two-thirds of their cross-border claims. Just 14% are denominated in yuan.

As is often pointed out, the Swiss Franc and Canadian and Australian dollars are used in more FX transactions than the Chinese yuan. It’s likely the yuan is more used down than in this 2019 data, but also consider that much of those flows will be with the Hong Kong dollar.

Which however you look at it is not exactly a global monetary transaction. The key thing that I think people fail to understand about the dollar’s global importance is that it’s founded not so much on the U.S. dollar regulated by the U.S. Federal Reserve, but the eurodollar, an instrument that few people know about and fewer understand. Are eurodollars money? Well, kinda. They owe their value to the fact that they’re freely convertible with U.S. dollars, on the balance sheets of banks in the U.S. But they are created on the balance sheets of banks outside the U.S. and not subject to Federal Reserve regulation. Eurodollars were the crypto of their day — a way to create money out of sight of government regulation. Their origin was in the dollar deposits of Communist countries after World War II, which the kept in Europe so that the Fed wouldn’t be able to freeze their assets.

It’s absolutely true that the Fed’s post-2008 swap lines, and the growing use of the dollar to extend the reach of Washington’s secondary sanctions, and the action against the central bank of Russia last month, start eroding the eurodollar’s autonomy. But compare it to assets in a country like China with a closed capital account and sweeping asset forfeiture rules like China’s so-called anti-sanctions law last year, and money based on the eurodollar is still the closest thing the world has to unregulated global finance.

If China opens up its capital account, starts running up huge budget deficits to provide more of a supply of safe assets, and establishes a solid reputation for rule of law, it might start to chip away at the edges of this edifice. But any one of those conditions on its own would be an epic, extraordinary policy change, and would take decades to come to fruition. And that only gets you to the point where the yuan is as important as, say, the euro or the yen.

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WEF AND crypto?!

Ukraine Adopts WEF Proposals (Armstrong)

Zelensky has just signed into law the first steps of Schwab’s Great Reset. He announced he is introducing a Social Credit Application combining Universal Basic Income (UBI), a Digital Identity & a Vaccine Passport all within their Diia app. He also says that because so much money is coming into Ukraine as he has become an international celebrity, he has legalized cryptocurrencies in Ukraine. He will allow foreign and Ukrainian cryptocurrencies exchanges to operate legally, according to the country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. So far, he has taken in over $63 million in cryptocurrency donations.

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100,000 US troops sent to Europe to NOT start a war.

NATO Calls up 100s of 1000s of Troops Ready to Begin WWIII (Armstrong)

The pressure to start World War III is on. NATO now expects that there will be a major war with Russia and the confrontation may come even in a few weeks. The NATO Secretary-General announced an increased war alert for hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Stoltenberg issued a joint statement with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, stating that hundreds of thousands of NATO troops were placed on high alert along with 100,000 US troops. The problem with war is that BOTH sides lie and twist the facts to support their own agenda. They paint their adversary as evil to stir up the troops to go fight and risk their lives typically for fake stories and agendas.

The Press is deliberately trying to create World War III and is engaged in using photos of children hurt and others from events unrelated to Ukraine. This is all to beat the war drums to create World War III without any honest understanding of what that will mean. Despite the hatred and demonization of Putin, he has been trying to take the high road. Zelensky has been following his orders and refusing to compromise on anything. As a WEF Young Global Leader, he is showing the same authoritarian approach as Trudeau in Canada as well as Australia and New Zealand who are all on board with this Great Reset. We may see this crisis turn into a confrontation as soon as the week of April 18th going into the first week of May based upon our computer models.

But the real crisis may come in August and turn global in 2023. I am glad I spent a fair portion of my life in Europe to see all the historical monuments before these people feel the need to destroy the world over two provinces in Ukraine. I fear this time, the monuments will not survive. Pray for civilization for we have madmen leading the West into World War III all so they can Build Back Better as they did following World War II with Bretton Woods II, but this time we are facing a completely different war with biological and nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the press will NEVER tell us the truth or explain just why people are expected to lose their lives for some noble cause that is always some propaganda to support a political agenda. This time, the bombs will be wiping out American cities unlike World War I and II not to mention Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or other clandestine operations. You may not be watching it on TV but out your own window. Well, we get what we deserve. America voted for Biden, Britain for Johnson, Canada for Trudeau, and Ukraine for Zelensky. There is no peacemaker and certainly no statesman among the crop of world leaders today. To even question what is going on they cancel you now as a Putin supporter to once more not have to explain the truth. There is NEVER truth to be found in the propaganda of war for either side.

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Censoring the laptop story was for domestic consumption. But Russia, China, India watch this unfold and see a corrupt rogue state that cannot be trusted.

The Times Finally Admits: Hunter’s Laptop Is Real (NYP op-ed)

Now we’re 16 months away from the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s safely in the White House, and the Times finally decides to report on the news rather than carry the Biden campaign’s water. And they find that hey, Hunter Biden’s business interests benefited from Joe Biden’s political status to a suspicious degree. Perhaps this is a topic worthy of examination. How did the Times “authenticate” the laptop? It doesn’t say. Unlike The Post’s reporting, which detailed exactly how we got the files and where they came from, the Times does a hand wave to anonymous sources. No facts have changed since fall 2020. They knew the laptop was real from the start. They just didn’t want to say so.

There’s never any shame with these 180s. Sorry that we wrote a “fact check” that turned out to be bull! Sorry we wrote a piece claiming something wasn’t a story and you were stupid for thinking so! Twitter banned us for supposedly publishing “hacked materials” that weren’t hacked. The company’s CEO apologized, but by that point, they had accomplished what they wanted. Like the Times, they cast enough doubt to avoid making their preferred candidate look bad. Readers of the Times have discovered in March 2022 that Hunter Biden pursued business deals in Europe and Asia, and may have leveraged his father’s position as vice president to do it. Hunter also may not have properly registered with the government or declared all his income. All legitimate topics of discussion about a presidential candidate’s family, no?

Readers of The Post have known this since October 2020. We also have a much better sports section. We’ve authenticated it.

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Special counsel. It’s the only approach.

How Dem Officials, The Media And Big Tech Buried The Hunter Biden Story (NYP)

Everlasting, undying, soul-rending shame be upon you, Facebook and Twitter and Politico and all the others who covered up, denied and suppressed this newspaper’s true and accurate reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. You should be hurling yourselves at the feet of the American people, begging forgiveness. You should be renting billboards saying, “WE LIED.” But most importantly, you should be hauled before Congress to answer humiliating questions. These and other information purveyors owe us — not just this paper, but this country — restitution for what now looks like the most egregious and willful fake-news scam of our time. This paper’s scoops on Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 were labeled “Russian misinformation” (Politico), a “hoax” (Steven Brill of “fact-check” site NewsGuard), discredited by “many, many red flags” (NPR) and a “hack and leak” operation that had to be throttled (Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg).

It was infamously snuffed out on Twitter, as was The Post’s Twitter account, because of a policy about hacked materials that only seemed to apply to this one case. Twitter didn’t bar the New York Times’s stories about Donald Trump’s tax returns, which could have come from hacked materials for all we know, and almost certainly were the product of a criminal act (leaking tax returns is against the law), but the Times never even told us how it got the returns, so we don’t know. The Post acted with transparency in explaining to readers how it got the Laptop from Hell. Moreover, nobody on Team Biden denied The Post’s report, because they knew or suspected it was true. Every news outlet in the country should have fronted the story at that point: “Biden team refuses to deny Hunter Biden laptop story.” A few months later, Hunter himself said the laptop “certainly” could be his, and the media shrugged instead of apologizing.


Even in the presidential debate where the matter came up, Joe Biden’s comments were not a denial but simply a deflection, and everybody who reported that he denied the laptop story was guilty of propagating fake news all over again. What he actually said was, “There are 50 former national intelligence folks who said that what he’s accusing me of is a Russian plant. Five former heads of the CIA, both parties, say what he’s saying is a bunch of garbage. Nobody believes it except his good friend Rudy Giuliani.” Joe (who later said “Yes, yes, yes” when a reporter asked him if he “believed” the laptop was Russian disinfo — the question allowed him all the wiggle room in the world) pointedly wasn’t denying the laptop belonged to Hunter, and wasn’t denying the material on it was genuine.

He was simply referring to the now-infamous Politico whitewash of October 19, 2020, which was fake news about fake news: The headline “Hunter Biden Story is Russian Disinfo, Dozens of Former Intelligence Officials Say” didn’t even accurately relate what was in the story. Those officials simply said they were “suspicious” about Russian involvement, admitted they had no evidence for this and pointed out (this was buried in the 10th paragraph of Politico’s story), “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails … are genuine or not.” In other words, the notorious liar James Clapper et al. (as far as I can tell, every signatory who made his opinion known about the election was a Biden supporter) were simply peeing in the dark. Their rank speculation was unworthy of being published.

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Watch Africa.

Food Supply Chains “Falling Apart” In Ukraine (ZH)

On Friday, Jakob Kern, an emergency coordinator at the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme (WFP), warned Ukraine’s food supply chains were collapsing as Russia bombed key infrastructures such as roads, bridges, and trains. “The country’s food supply chain is falling apart. Movements of goods have slowed down due to insecurity and the reluctance of drivers,” Kern told a Geneva during a video conference from Krakow, Poland. “Inside Ukraine our job is in effect, to replace the broken commercial food supply chains,” he added, describing the rebuilding task as a “mammoth” one. Ukraine’s top agricultural export products are corn and wheat. Before the invasion, Ukraine was the second-largest supplier of grains for the European Union and one of the largest suppliers for emerging markets in Asia and Africa.

Breaking down the numbers, Ukraine produced 49.6% of global sunflower oil, 10% of global wheat, 12.6% of global barley, and 15.3% of global maize. Estimates via Black Sea research firm SovEcon show Ukraine’s 2022 corn harvest could plunge as much as 35% from 41.9 million tons last year to 27.7 million tons this year because of all the disruptions. Farmers are already reporting diesel and fertilizer shortages. Wheat harvests are also expected to decline. Some have even pointed total crop output in the country could be halved. “With global food prices at an all-time high, WFP is also concerned about the impact of the Ukraine crisis on food security globally, especially hunger hot spots,” he said, warning of “collateral hunger” in other places like Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Turkey that rely heavily on Ukraine imports.

All of this has fueled the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization to warn global food prices could rise another 8-20% from current levels due to the deteriorating situation in Ukraine. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Michael Fakhri, also warned today, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may cause a global surge in malnutrition and famine. “For the last three years, global rates of hunger and famine have been on the rise. With the Russian invasion, we are now facing the risk of imminent famine and starvation in more places around the world,” Fakhri said in a statement.

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“Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy.”

Russia Blocks Ships Carrying Grain Exports (DW)

Wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, which make up a vital part of the world’s food supply are still being blocked by Russia from leaving the Black Sea, Germany’s largest agricultural trader BayWa said this week. “Zero [grain] is currently being exported from the ports of Ukraine — nothing is leaving the country at all,” Jörg-Simon Immerz, head of the grain trading at BayWa, told dpa news agency. He added that the export activity on the Russian side is “very limited.” Immerz’s assessment was backed up by the Panamanian Maritime Authority, who said on Wednesday that the Russian Navy was preventing 200-300 ships from leaving the Black Sea — most of them were carrying grain. Other reports suggest around 100 vessels are blocked.

Noriel Arauz, the administrator for the authority, said three Panamanian-flagged ships have come under Russian fire since the invasion of Ukraine started. One of the ships sank and two others were damaged, while no one was injured. British newspaper The Guardian reported that several other ships have been struck since the invasion began on February 24, including from Bangladesh and Estonia, which killed one person. Russia blames the stoppage on the high risk of mines, which it said had been laid by the Ukrainian Navy. Questions have been raised about how much grain Ukraine will be able to produce this year due to the conflict. At the same time, Russia has vowed to retaliate against Western sanctions that have crippled its economy.

Curbs on wheat and fertilizer exports are presumed to be high on Moscow’s list, which could have further consequences for the world’s food supply and food price inflation. Russia produces close to 80 million metric tons of wheat a year and exports close to 30 million tons, while Ukraine exports about 20 to 25 million tons a year. BayWa, meanwhile, believes there is no reason to fear a wheat shortage as much more wheat is harvested in the EU than is consumed. “The EU exports about 30 million metric tons of wheat annually, and Germany is also an exporter in normal years,” Immerz said. But that is not true for all types of grain. “We rely on imports for corn,” he added.

[..] Meanwhile, a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned about the impact of the war on the food situation in Africa. Between 2018 and 2020, Russia accounted for nearly a third of wheat imports to the continent, while around 12% come from Ukraine. The UNCTAD report said up to 25 African countries, especially the least developed economies, relied on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine.

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Thread. SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

“Died Suddenly” Solved (Chesnut)

BUILDING: MY MOST IMPORTANT FINDING TO DATE: DIED UNEXPECTEDLY SOLVED. SUDEP AND “DIED UNEXPECTEDLY” – THE SPIKE PROTEIN, FIBROSIS AND THE BRAINSTEM. PART I “A SILENT ENTRANCE”. As you recall, the original spike caused a loss of the sense of smell, the medical term is Anosmia.

The olfactory (sense of smell) system happens to be a DIRECT ROUTE TO THE BRAINSTEM. Indeed, when we look at autopsies, the Spike Protein is a very frequent “guest” in the Brainstem. Pathological immune responses or SARS-CoV-2 invasion of the brainstem is suspected. An autopsy study has isolated 32 brain sections from 16 victims of COVID-19 and found concentrated SARS-CoV-2 RNA (>5 copies/mm3) in three sections from the olfactory nerves and the brainstem’s MEDULLA. More convincingly, in another autopsy study of deceased COVID-19 patients, SARS-CoV-2 RNA and proteins (nucleocapsid or SPIKE) were detected in 50% and 40% of brainstem samples, respectively.

Similarly, another autopsy study has found SARS-CoV-2 RNA and SPIKE PROTEINS in the olfactory mucosal-neuronal junction and brainstem’s MEDULLA in 67% and 19% of samples, respectively. In sum, these autopsy studies have provided evidence for SARS-CoV-2 tropism FROM THE OLFACTORY SYSTEM INTO THE BRAINSTEM. OK. We know the Spike Protein invades the Medulla of the Brainstem. So, what does this mean? Well, those who suffer from Epilepsy are prone to sudden death. In fact, it is because of PATHOLOGIC CORRELATIONS IN THE MEDULLA that they suffer what is known as SUDEP- Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy.

Sudden unexpected death in epilepsy (SUDEP) likely arises as a result of AUTONOMIC DYSFUNCTION around the time of a seizure. In vivo MRI studies report volume reduction in the MEDULLA and other brainstem autonomic regions. Rostro-caudal alterations of medullary volume in SUDEP localize with regions containing respiratory regulatory nuclei. They may represent seizure-related alterations, relevant to the pathophysiology of SUDEP. Now, this heretofore rare event is now becoming all too common. The “One-Two Punch” of aberrant spike protein brainstem signaling (remodeling) combined with spike protein cardiac remodeling has virtually recreated the EXACT ENVIRONMENT OF SUDEP!

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“..cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%..”

UK will HIDE Vaccinated Cases and Deaths (Chudov)

The infamous UKHSA Vaccine Surveillance Report started as a great tool by the vaccinators to showcase incredible successes of Covid Vaxx. But, as time went on, success was no longer in the cards, and the reports displayed grimmer and grimmer failure of vaccines in the UK. As I said many times, the bad news from the UK in no way should be interpreted as the UK being somehow a bad country. To the contrary, the UK had an amazing statistical agency that (up until now) honestly reported the goings in the vaxxed world. Finally, it seems, just as Scotland did, the UK will discontinue case reports by vaccination status. They gave the lamest excuse of “ending free Covid testing” that somehow makes them unable to add up vaccinated vs unvaccinated cases? Come on.

The so called “free Covid testing” is likely ending for similarly sinister reasons, specifically because they want to downplay cases as they keep increasing in the UK. Well, these UKHSA reports were good while it lasted. The truthful cases by vaccination status reports, showing the ignominous ending of the UK vaccination campaign, will be available no more starting April. [..] Before I describe what is it that they are trying to hide, let me mention my methodology: I keep a spreadsheet that I update week by week, with counts of vaccinated vs boosted case rates and death rates. I do NOT include under-18s in my data because they are (were) overtested in schools, do not actually die of Covid, thankfully, and really are not the same population as adults.

What they are trying to hide is that the pandemic among the unvaccinated is essentially over, whereas it is just getting started among the boosted. Look at the numbers: Compared to week 6-9, cases in week 7-10 among the unvaccinated barely increased by 1%, from 59,904 cases to 60,372. For the boosted, cases increased by 14%, from 543,809 to 617,982! For the vulnerable 60-69 year old category, the boosted 60-69 year olds get sick 4.25 TIMES as much as unvaccinated 60-69 year olds. Take a minute to let that sink in. Far from being protective, boosters make 60-69 year olds four times more vulnerable to infections!

Deaths similarly show a sad picture. 90% of Covid deaths in the UK, in weeks 7-10, were among the vaccinated!

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The “potentially fatal blood-clotting issue” was not known, because it was never tested.

Two UK Residents Died of Blood-Clotting Disorders Linked to AstraZeneca (CHD)

UK coroners in two separate cases this week concluded individuals who received AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine died from blood-clotting disorders caused by the vaccine. Kim Lockwood, a 34-year-old mother from South Yorkshire, died in March 2021 of a catastrophic brain bleed nine days after getting the AstraZeneca shot. Lockwood complained of an excruciating headache eight days after getting the vaccine. Her condition quickly deteriorated and she was pronounced dead 17 hours after being admitted to the hospital. South Yorkshire Coroner Nicola Mundy, calling Lockwood “extremely unlucky,” recorded the cause of death as vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia (VITT).


Separately, a Sheffield County inquest on Monday concluded Tom Dudley, a 31-year old father of two who received the Astra-Zeneca vaccine on April 27, 2021, died of a vaccine-induced brain hemorrhage on May 14, 2021. The UK’s National Health Service on May 7, 2021, changed the guidance for the AstraZeneca vaccine, suggesting healthy individuals under 40 should avoid it due to possible blood-clotting complications. Assistant coroner Tanyka Rawden said that at the time of Dudley’s death the potentially fatal blood-clotting issue “was not a known and recognized complication of this vaccine. It seems to me that the guidelines have been changed,” she said. “They were changed very, very quickly after Tom had his vaccination.”

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After big decisions had been based on precisely those numbers.

CDC Removes 24% of Child COVID-19 Deaths, Thousands of Others (ET)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has removed tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID-19, including nearly a quarter of deaths it had listed in those under 18 years old. The health agency quietly made the change on its data tracker website on March 15. “Data on deaths were adjusted after resolving a coding logic error. This resulted in decreased death counts across all demographic categories,” the CDC says on the site. The CDC relies on states and other jurisdictions to report COVID-19 deaths and acknowledges on its website that the data is not complete. But the statistics are often cited by doctors and others when pushing for COVID-19 vaccination, including figures who believe virtually all children should be vaccinated.

Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the CDC’s director, cited the tracker’s death total in November 2021 while pushing for an expert panel to advise her agency to recommend vaccination for all children 5- to 11-years-old. Before the change, the CDC listed 1,755 children as dying from COVID-19 along with approximately 851,000 others, according to Kelley Krohnert, a Georgia resident who has been tracking the updates. The update saw the CDC cut 416 deaths among children and over 71,000 elsewhere, arriving at a total of just under 780,000. The CDC previously adjusted its death count in August 2021 “after the identification of a data discrepancy.”

“The update is an improvement, but it’s at least the third correction to this data, and still does not solve the issue. It just highlights that people have been using a flawed source of data when discussing kids and COVID,” Krohnert told The Epoch Times in an email. Some journalists and doctors have been citing the tracker data while others use a tally that is managed by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has been described by the agency as more reliable. The NCHS tally, which is compiled from death certificates, currently lists 921 deaths involving COVID-19 among children and some 966,000 deaths involving COVID-19 among other age groups.

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“I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already..”

2 days after he warns of another wave….

Fauci Says He’s Considering Stepping Down (ET)

Dr. Anthony Fauci said in a new interview that he is considering stepping away from the position he’d held since 1984. Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), was asked during a podcast released March 18 whether he was mulling retirement or transitioning to a less-demanding job. “I certainly am because I’ve got to do it sometime,” Fauci, 81, said. “I can’t stay at this job forever, unless my staff is going to find me slumped over my desk one day. I’d rather not do that,” he added. Fauci was appointed to his position in 1984 during the Reagan administration. Fauci’s comments came after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) failed in his effort to get support for a measure that would eliminate the NIAID and create three new institutes in its stead.

Paul, who has clashed with Fauci during multiple congressional hearings, said Fauci has become has become a “dictator-in-chief.” “No one person should have unilateral authority to make decisions for millions of Americans,” Paul, a doctor, said. Fauci and his agency had not responded to requests for comment on the measure. Paul and other Fauci critics have taken issue with how the doctor misled the public on his agency’s funding for the Chinese lab located near the first cases of COVID-19 were recorded, his support for harsh measures during the pandemic, and his admission that he lied about the effectiveness of masks because of worries there wouldn’t be enough for health care workers.

Fauci, who has also been preparing for investigations Republicans have pledged into the COVID-19 response, has called Paul a partisan whose accusations aren’t rooted in facts. Without mentioning Paul, the podcast host asked Fauci in the new interview whether he would leave his post soon, noting that besides Dr. Francis Collins, who exited from his position as director of the National Institutes of Health in late 2021, Jeffrey Zients was stepping down as the White House COVID-19 response coordinator. “I have said that I would stay in what I’m doing until we get out of the pandemic phase, and I think we might be there already,” Fauci said. “If we can stay in this, then we’re at a point where I feel that we’ve done well by this. But I don’t have any plans right now to go anywhere, but you never know.”

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Aug 252020
 


Robert Capa Model wearing Dior on the banks of the Seine, Paris 1948

 

Pelosi Calls Republicans ‘Domestic Enemies Of The State’ (ZH)
UK Lockdown Was A ‘Monumental Mistake’ And Must Not Happen Again (Exp.)
Let’s Follow the History of Science Instead (AIER)
New York University To Implement Racial Segregation In Student Dorms (WSWS)
Is The Euro Living On Borrowed Time? (Brown)
Powell Set To Deliver Speech Changing How The Fed Views Inflation (CNBC)
Exxon Mobil Dropped From The Dow After Nearly A Century (CBS)
1 In 3 Cars Worldwide Is Produced In China (ZH)
Greece, Turkey Heading For New Crisis (K.)
Biblical Travails (Jim Kunstler)
UN World Food Program Seeks To Prevent ‘Famine Of Biblical Proportions’ (ZH)

 

 

Calling your political opponents “enemies of the state” is not done even in 2020 America.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Way over the line. There are still things you can’t say even in the 2020 US.

And you thought Biden was dementing…

Nancy, you’re 80. Call it a day.

Pelosi Calls Republicans ‘Domestic Enemies Of The State’ (ZH)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) raged against President Trump and Congressional Republicans on Monday, telling MSNBC that they’re “domestic enemies” of election integrity and “enemies of the state.” Pelosi was speaking right after President Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, according to the Daily Caller. “We take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. And sadly, the domestic enemies to our voting system and honoring our Constitution are right at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue with their allies in the Congress of the United States. But again, let’s just get out there and mobilize, organize, and not let the President deter anybody from voting. And again, support the postal system which is election central,” said the 80-year-old Democrat. “They’re doing everything they can; suppress the vote — with your actions, scare people, intimidate by saying law enforcement will be there, diminish the role of the postal system in all of this. It’s really actually shameful. Enemies of the state,” she continued.

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Perhaps this guy means well, but to conclude from the UK’s botched version of a lockdown that NO lockdown can work, takes away all his credibility. Phrasing matters.

And besides, buddy, you’re the government advisor here. Own it.

UK Lockdown Was A ‘Monumental Mistake’ And Must Not Happen Again (Exp.)

Lockdown will come to be seen as a “monumental mistake on a global scale” and must never happen again, a scientist who advises the Government on infectious diseases says.Mark Woolhouse said lockdown was a “panic measure” but admitted it was the only option at the time because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do”. But it is a crude measure that takes no accounts of the risk levels to different individuals, the University of Edinburgh professor said, meaning that back in March the nation was “concentrating on schools when we should have been concentrating on care homes”. The professor of infectious disease epidemiology said that the Government must now focus on increasing testing and striving to unlock society safely rather than restricting it further.

Prof Woolhouse OBE, a member of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours that advises the Government, said: “Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease. “I never want to see national lockdown again. It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally, however low we drove down the number of cases, and now we know more about the virus and how to track it we should not be in this position again.

“We absolutely should never return to a position where children cannot play or go to school. “I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by Covid-19.” He said that Sage, the government’s advisory board on dealing with Covid, needed to have members from a wider range of fields.

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And here’s another genius: “..our descendants will mock us for believing masks slowed viral transmission.”

No they won’t, unless they’re as stupid as he is. Lockdowns and facemasks prevent transmission, no science is more basic than that. But you do have to use them wisely.

If you send people out into the street with mandatory masks on, then yes, they don’t prevent anything. Because there is no risk of infection there. But put them in a cramped room for a period of time, and they are very effective.

What is it with these people, is it all just about hearing their own voices, credibility be damned? Some virus got to their brains?

I’m seriously starting to wonder where the virus causes the most damage. And it doesn’t appear to be either in care homes or classrooms, but in much smaller spaces.

Let’s Follow the History of Science Instead (AIER)

Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Biden is only the most high-profile politician to promise voters that he will “listen to the scientists,” mandate masks, and shut down the economy again if they so advise. Even the humble members of the city council of Milledgeville, Georgia invoke “science” in four pages of “whereas-es” designed to justify a largely toothless mask mandate that directly contradicts a Georgia law against wearing masks in public (except for certain holidays, presumably to deter real crime) and the enforcement of which in some places in the city of 50,000 apparently hinges on the font size of a door notice. Strange times indeed, these. One wonders why we need to elect politicians at all if they will simply defer to “the” scientists. Ah, but there be the rub. Which scientists? They don’t agree on much, especially when it comes to the novel coronavirus and masks and such.


Should we listen only to “the” scientists on the government payroll? But then wouldn’t they essentially be unelected, unaccountable dictators? That sounds vaguely undemocratic. Sticky, this wicket! Plus, last time I checked, “the” scientists have no policy expertise in economics. Perhaps that does not matter as many economists also have no policy expertise in economics. Is that the role of politicians, then? To decide which type of scientists get to dictate in different policy areas? Perhaps Biden will listen to “the” economists on spaceship design or military tactics? I would pay good money to see that! (Seriously, it would be a horribly expensive boondoggle certain to raise my taxes.) Why is it so important to “listen to the scientists” anyway? Are they suddenly less fallible than previously? Is there any science to support that belief? Because let’s face it, “the” scientists have a pretty poor track record overall.

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I’m afraid I simply don’t understand the reasoning. Black students don’t want to explain about racism? But isn’t that sort of the whole point?

New York University To Implement Racial Segregation In Student Dorms (WSWS)

Since late June, the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services at New York University (NYU) has been working closely with a small, student-led task force to make racially segregated housing a reality in undergraduate student dorms. On July 20, Washington Square News, the weekly undergraduate student newspaper of NYU, published an article titled “Student-Led Task Force Calls for Black Housing on Campus,” in which it reported on the university’s willingness to help implement residential communities open solely to “Black-identifying students with Black Resident Assistants.” Since then, the university has officially given the project a green light, aiming to have NYU’s first segregated residential floor established by Fall 2021.

A little over two months ago, a recently organized advocacy group called Black Violets created an online petition demanding that the university “implement Black student housing on campus in the vein of themed engagement floors across first-year and upperclassmen residence halls.” In its petition, the group argues that “Too often in the classroom and in residential life, black students bear the brunt of educating their uninformed peers about racism.” African American students, the group states, desperately require a “safe space” where they can escape from students, staff and faculty of other races. There are over 20 Themed Engagement Communities at NYU, with themes ranging from film, literature and theater to technology, science and foreign languages. All floors are open to all students, who request residency on a specific floor prior to the start of the academic year.

The approval of a Themed Engagement Community open to students based on their race is new at NYU. However, it is not the first time that the Office of Residential Life and Housing Services has considered such a proposal. In 2002, an NYU senior submitted a plan to develop race-based housing for African American students, claiming that “such a housing program would unite African American students on campus” and better combat racial discrimination. This proposal was eventually rejected by the university after a brief review and discussion.

Now, despite signs of minimal support from the undergraduate student body—the online petition has garnered a mere 1,105 signatures out of the 26,733 total undergraduates currently studying at NYU—the proposal for race-based housing has been warmly welcomed by the university administration. There is nothing progressive about the establishment of racially segregated housing at NYU. It is irrelevant whether the segregation being implemented is voluntary or mandatory. Racial segregation, in all forms, is entirely reactionary. The vile argument advanced in the proposal is that all non-African American students, staff and faculty are, to varying degrees, hostile and dangerous to African American students. Their animosity stems from an inherent antipathy towards individuals of different races.

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“Investors” gamble on gold, they gamble on the euro. And they feel confident they’ll be able to get out on time. Basic, really. Pump trillions into “markets” and this is what happens.

Is The Euro Living On Borrowed Time? (Brown)

Given the way the euro has been rallying in the foreign exchange markets over the past three months, you would be forgiven for thinking the currency has become a beacon of stability in uncertain times. You couldn’t be further from the truth. The rebound in the euro is simply the flip side of the US dollar being undermined by growing uncertainty about the upcoming US presidential election in November and how the US authorities are coping with the coronavirus crisis. Global investors are simply taking time out from long dollar exposures, and euro bulls are simply filling a temporary void. It won’t last long. The euro is living on borrowed time and the deepening monetary muddle in Europe won’t help the currency once the dust settles on the US elections.

The euro looks overvalued and a prime target for an ambush later this year. Europe’s monetary pacesetter, the European Central Bank, seems to be fighting a losing battle, struggling to keep the European economy from slipping into a deeper recession. The more policy stimulus the ECB throws into the ring, the greater the damage to its monetary reputation, and to little avail so far. Despite close to 3 trillion euros of assets purchased so far under the ECB’s quantitative easing programme and interest rates steeped in negative territory, the economy of Europe is showing precious few signs of a return to normality. Europe’s three biggest economies, Germany, France and Italy, are all stuck in recession with little chance of output reaching pre-pandemic levels until 2022. Rumblings about throwing too much good money after bad are no surprise. The ECB’s defence is that it has no alternative, otherwise Europe might suffer an even worse fate.

Germany has given up the ghost on trying to control the ECB’s monetary excesses. There seems to be a palpable sense of “if you can’t beat them, join them” for the sake of presenting a united front and avoiding a damaging public row. In the pre-euro days, tough Bundesbank policies and the strong Deutschmark were solid anchors of the European monetary system, implacable yardsticks which helped other European countries govern their own performances. [..] The worry for markets is that the triple-A-rated ECB’s vaults are bursting with a surfeit of lower-quality debt from nations like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland, countries which have required support in times of market stress in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Like in the US subprime crisis, it’s fine while the charade lasts, but once confidence begins to wobble, that is where the danger lies.

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The Fed is going to try its hand at Abanomics?! Didn’t work for Japan. Remember, to raise inflation you need to raise the velocity of money. Which today meanns you have to raise the velocity of trillions of added dollars. Good luck with that.

Powell Set To Deliver Speech Changing How The Fed Views Inflation (CNBC)

History will remember Paul Volcker and Jerome Powell as standing on the opposite ends of the inflation canyon, with the former taking desperate actions to try to tamp it down and the latter expected this week to announce an unprecedented effort to crank it back up. Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman from 1979-87, ushered through a series of inflation-busting interest rate hikes that dragged the country into recession but won the fight against pricing pressures and spurred a powerful economic recovery. Powell, the central bank chief since 2018, is likely to detail a set of measures aimed at pushing inflation higher amid a coronavirus pandemic that has dragged the U.S. economy into one of its darkest hours.

While the average consumer might find it absurd to want to raise the cost of living, central bankers and economists see too little inflation also as a problem. It often reflects a slow-moving economy with a low standard of living. On top of that, the accompanying low interest rates give policymakers little wiggle room when crises happen and there’s a need to loosen policy. That’s why Powell, who will speak Thursday during a virtual version of the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming, conference, will outline what could be the central bank’s most active efforts ever to spur inflation back to a healthy level. The speech is titled “Monetary Policy Framework Review” and wraps up a yearlong examination both among central bank officials and with the public, during a series of open events, on what policy should look like in the future.

“The expectations are pretty high to get something meaningful on Thursday,” said Tom Graff, head of fixed income at Brown Advisory. “This is probably a historic speech.” One phrase Powell is likely to use is “average inflation” targeting. Simply, it means that the Fed, which has pegged 2% as a healthy level, will let inflation run higher than that for a while if it has spent a considerable time beneath that level. The Fed’s preferred inflation gauge has stayed below that level for all but two years since the Great Recession ended in mid-2009. It’s a mirror-image reversal of Volcker’s inflation-busting and sets the stage for a pivotal policy move.

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“In the 1980s, energy companies made up as much as a quarter of the Dow. After Exxon’s exits on Monday, energy will account for just 2% of the index.”

Exxon Mobil Dropped From The Dow After Nearly A Century (CBS)

Exxon Mobil, which joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, is being removed from the blue-chip stock market index. Its replacement: enterprise software company Salesforce.com. Also leaving the index are drug company Pfizer and airplane and defense contractor Raytheon Technologies. They are being replaced by biotech Amgen and manufacturing conglomerate Honeywell. S&P Dow Jones Indices, the company that administers the index, announced the changes, which will take place August 31, on Monday. The index provider said the changes were necessary to make up for Apple’s impending stock split, which becomes effective the same day.

The Dow Jones is a stock-price-weighed index. Apple’s stock split, which will take the company’s shares to roughly $120, from $500, would have cut the Dow’s exposure to the technology sector. Monday’s changes would also help the Dow “add new types of businesses that better reflect the American economy,” the index company said. Energy giant Exxon Mobil joined the Dow 92 years ago as Standard Oil of New Jersey, and it’s the oldest member of the index. The Dow’s last original member, General Electric, was removed in 2018. Exxon Mobil was the most valuable company in the United States for much of the early 2000s and as recently as 2011, when it hit a market value of just over $400 billion. Apple overtook Exxon in 2012, and much of the technology sector followed.

Earlier this month, Apple’s market value topped $2 trillion, making it the first U.S. company to reach that milestone. Meanwhile, Exxon’s market value has sunk to $175 billion. The company has been plagued in part by claims that it deliberately concealed the damage that the oil it has long extracted and refined into gasoline was doing to the planet. [..] In the 1980s, energy companies made up as much as a quarter of the Dow. After Exxon’s exits on Monday, energy will account for just 2% of the index.

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A loss of 40% in 5 years. Wow.

1 In 3 Cars Worldwide Is Produced In China (ZH)

Almost one in three – or 32 percent – of all cars produced worldwide in 2019 came out of China. As shown in numbers by the automobile manufacturers’ association OICA, the world manufactures less cars than it did in 2014, but, as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz notes, several Asian markets actually were able to grow their production volumes. India exhibited one of the biggest increases – almost 15 percent in five years to 3.6 million cars annually.


The biggest decrease in production hit the ailing U.S. car industry, which lost 40 percent of its domestic production between 2014 and 2019. Germany also make less cars at home, but German manufacturers like Volkswagen are a part of the rising Chinese production. In 2019, the Chinese market accounted for around 39 percent of Volkswagen’s total sales. Shifting production sites are only one aspect of the internationalization of the car industry. Know-how also migrates with production [..]

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Erdogan has ever less to lose. His popularity at home is decreasing fast, with the lira in the gutter. Greece’s friends better start raising their voices.

Greece, Turkey Heading For New Crisis (K.)

Just when it seemed that Greece and Turkey were entering a phase of de-escalation, the two countries appeared on Monday to be heading for another crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean. The decision by Ankara for an extension of the duration of exploratory activities by the Oruc Reis survey vessel in areas within the Greek continental shelf prompted a response by Athens with Tuesday’s aeronautical exercise that begins on Tuesday at dawn over a large area from the south of Kassos to the south of Kastellorizo. The exercise will take place in areas included in the navigational advisory, or Navtex, issued by Turkey for the Oruc Reis within the Greek continental shelf. The exercise will last until Thursday night.

Turkey’s move to extend the activities of the Oruc Reis essentially raises obstacles to the German mediation effort which continues on Tuesday with visits to both Athens and Ankara by German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas. Meanwhile, tensions were further augmented on Monday night by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who issued direct war threats against Greece, which he said is being “deceived” by other countries into pursuing the course of action it is taking. “When an issue arises in the future, then these forces will disappear and Greece will be left alone,” he said, adding that “from now on, Greece will be responsible for all conflicts in the region and it will be at a disadvantage.” He also described the aeronautical exercise announced by Athens as “useless” and dangerous for navigation.

Shortly before Erdogan’s remarks, Ankara announced new exercises off southern Crete for Tuesday morning, in an area several miles south of the prefecture of Lassithi. The area is located approximately on the borders described in the Turkey-Libya maritime borders memorandum. At the same time, Athens is building a network of important military collaborations, as joint exercises are also expected with French Rafale jets based in Cyprus.

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Conflicting stories about the violence. Kenosha was a hellhole again last night. At some point, Trump will have to act. And that’s what the Dems are hoping for.

Biblical Travails (Jim Kunstler)

Could the country even stand another full-on political convention after the Democrats’ nauseating extravaganza last week? The nation is so marinated in agitprop, disinfo, and straight-up mendacity that all the intelligence has been leached out of population, perhaps even the will to live. A Republican convention complete with the usual showboating might deplete the remaining oxycontin supply across the land as unemployed millions, mulling over rents overdue and unmet car payments, resort to vodka, Xanax, cough syrup, and airplane glue to quell the pain induced by unbridled political bullshit. As BLM might put it: “Know whum sayin’?

Speaking of BLM, Sunday one Jacob Blake, 29, was apparently shot in the back by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while getting into a car. The incident inspired a night of BLM rioting and looting in downtown Kenosha, with excellent prospects for violence to spread to other cities. Mr. Blake was hospitalized and survives, so far. He was not complying with police instructions in the process of his arrest. He had been previously arrested in 2015 and charged with brandishing a gun in a barroom. Upon his arrest then, the gun was found on the floor of his car. In the latest incident, Kenosha police were responding to a domestic abuse complaint. There was an active warrant out on Mr. Blake.

Also over the weekend, police in Lafayette, Louisiana, shot and killed 31-year-old Trayford Pellerin outside a convenience store he was entering while brandishing a knife. They had followed him from another convenience store in the vicinity where he “created a disturbance with a knife.” Mr. Pellerin apparently refused to comply with police orders to get on the ground. Ben Crump, a civil rights lawyer hired to represent the Pellerin family during the investigation into the shooting, said, “His family believes that he was suffering a mental illness crisis and what he needed was a helping hand. But what he got was what looks like 11 bullets.” His mother told the Associated Press that Mr. Pellerin had sought therapy for social anxiety.

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A line used so much people have become immune to it.

UN World Food Program Seeks To Prevent ‘Famine Of Biblical Proportions’ (ZH)

While virus cases and deaths dominate headlines, other humanitarian crises also need attention, that is, an emerging “famine of biblical proportions” that threatens much of the world, United Nations World Food Program (WFP) Director David Beasley told TASS News last weekend in an interview. Beasley said the WFP is requesting $5 billion in emergency funds within the next six months that will help in the effort to thwart a global famine. “All the data we have, including WFP’s forecast of an 80% increase in the number of food-insecure people – from 140 million before the pandemic to 270 million by the end of this year – points to a real catastrophe, a famine of biblical proportions, “he said.

The dramatic rise in the number of people who don’t have the means to feed themselves because of depressionary unemployment, supply chain breakdowns, and crop failures is set to cause long-term economic damage that could prevent a vibrant economic recovery. Beasley said, “it is clear that social tensions will escalate, migration will increase, conflicts will expand, and hunger can affect those who have not experienced it before.” Even in the US, a developed world economy, tens of millions of folks have gone hungry, now relying on government aid and food banks for survival. He noted that countries in the 2008 financial crash with a “stronger social protection system” were less impacted by famine.

WFP projections show significant increases in malnourished people in Latin America, countries in Eastern and Central Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa, had a doubling of the number of people going hungry in a short period. “World hunger is already sky-high, and if we do not act immediately, many will die, children will suffer the consequences of malnutrition for many years to come, and the whole world will be thrown back, having lost all the gains in the fight against hunger of the last decade. Will be incredibly high, we need to act quickly and wisely, balancing immediate relief and long-term recovery,” Beasley said. He added: “WFP’s mission is to provide food to 138 million people in 2020, the largest humanitarian operation in history. And this unprecedented crisis requires an incredible amount of money.”

Read more …

 

 

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Oct 162018
 


M. C. Escher Doric columns 1945

 

Yemen On Brink Of ‘World’s Worst Famine In 100 Years’ (G.)
Humanity Is ‘Cutting Down The Tree Of Life’ (G.)
‘Hyperalarming’ Study Shows Massive Insect Loss (WaPo)
America’s Budget Deficit Jumps By 17% As Spending Surges (CNBC)
More Free Money: A Carry Trade in Liquidity (Mish)
Powell Has Lost His North Star, And The Fed Is Flying Blind (MW)
Facebook Paid £15.8 Million In UK Tax On £1.2 Billion In 2017 Revenues (BBC)
Ecuador To Assange: No Talking Politics, Pay Own Bills, Look After Cat (RT)
Brexit Deal Slipping To December Amid Deadlocked Talks (Ind.)
No-Deal Brexit Is ‘More Likely Than Ever Before’ – Tusk (Ind.)
Syria’s Chessboard (Hallinan)

 

 

As Stormy Daniels and Elizabeth Warren see their ‘cases’ blow up in their faces 3 weeks before the midterms, the best PR and legal teams that money can buy are framing a Khashoggi narrative nobody will be able to credibly deny. Or at least Erdogan is not showing his hand. But now that Pompeo’s in the region anyway, let’s put this on his agenda. 12 to 13 million at risk of starvation.

Yemen On Brink Of ‘World’s Worst Famine In 100 Years’ (G.)

Yemen could be facing the worst famine in 100 years if airstrikes by the Saudi-led coalition are not halted, the UN has warned. If war continues, famine could engulf the country in the next three months, with 12 to 13 million civilians at risk of starvation, according to Lise Grande, the agency’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen. She told the BBC: “I think many of us felt as we went into the 21st century that it was unthinkable that we could see a famine like we saw in Ethiopia, that we saw in Bengal, that we saw in parts of the Soviet Union – that was just unacceptable. “Many of us had the confidence that would never happen again and yet the reality is that in Yemen that is precisely what we are looking at.”

Yemen has been in the grip of a bloody civil war for three years after Houthi rebels, backed by Iran, seized much of the country, including the capital, Sana’a. The Saudi-led coalition has been fighting the rebels since 2015 in support of the internationally recognised government. Thousands of civilians have been caught in the middle, trapped by minefields and barrages of mortars and airstrikes. The resulting humanitarian catastrophe has seen at least 10,000 people killed and millions displaced. Speaking on Sunday evening, Grande said: “There’s no question we should be ashamed, and we should, every day that we wake up, renew our commitment to do everything possible to help the people that are suffering and end the conflict.”

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And it’s not just people that we’re killing:

Humanity Is ‘Cutting Down The Tree Of Life’ (G.)

Humanity’s ongoing annihilation of wildlife is cutting down the tree of life, including the branch we are sitting on, according to a stark new analysis. More than 300 different mammal species have been eradicated by human activities. The new research calculates the total unique evolutionary history that has been lost as a result at a startling 2.5bn years. Furthermore, even if the destruction of wild areas, poaching and pollution were ended within 50 years and extinction rates fell back to natural levels, it would still take 5-7 million years for the natural world to recover. Many scientists think a sixth mass extinction of life on Earth has begun, propelled by human destruction of wildlife, and 83% of wild mammals have already gone.

The new work puts this in the context of the evolution and extinction of species that occurred for billions of years before modern humans arrived. “We are doing something that will last millions of years beyond us,” said Matt Davis at Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the new research. “It shows the severity of what we are in right now. We’re entering what could be an extinction on the scale of what killed the dinosaurs. “That is pretty scary. We are starting to cut down the whole tree [of life], including the branch we are sitting on right now.” Ecosystems around the world have already been significantly affected by the extermination of big animals such as mammoths, he said.

[..] Davis said each lost species had its own intrinsic value, but the loss of the most distinct creatures was most damaging: “Typically, if you have something that is off by itself, it does some job that no other species is doing.” The losses are already affecting ecosystems, he said, particularly the vanishing of “megafauna”. These huge creatures roamed much of Earth until humans arrived and included giant cats, deer, beavers and armadillos. “We are now living in a world without giants,” said Davis. “So the seeds of big fruit are not dispersed any more because we don’t have mammoths or gomphotheres or giant ground sloths eating those fruits.” Another example, he said, is the widespread loss of wolves. This means smaller predators like coyotes thrive and more birds are killed, radically changing food chains.

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“Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold..”

“..our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web. ”

‘Hyperalarming’ Study Shows Massive Insect Loss (WaPo)

Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized. Huge numbers of bugs have been lost in a pristine national forest in Puerto Rico, the study found, and the forest’s insect-eating animals have gone missing, too. In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent. In places where long-term insect data are available, mainly in Europe, insect numbers are plummeting. A study last year showed a 76 percent decrease in flying insects in the past few decades in German nature preserves.

The latest report, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that this startling loss of insect abundance extends to the Americas. The study’s authors implicate climate change in the loss of tropical invertebrates. “This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call — a clarion call — that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” said David Wagner, an expert in invertebrate conservation at the University of Connecticut who was not involved with this research. He added: “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”

[..] “We went down in ’76, ’77 expressly to measure the resources: the insects and the insectivores in the rain forest, the birds, the frogs, the lizards,” Lister said. He came back nearly 40 years later, with his colleague Andrés García, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. What the scientists did not see on their return troubled them. “Boy, it was immediately obvious when we went into that forest,” Lister said. Fewer birds flitted overhead. The butterflies, once abundant, had all but vanished. García and Lister once again measured the forest’s insects and other invertebrates, a group called arthropods that includes spiders and centipedes. The researchers trapped arthropods on the ground in plates covered in a sticky glue, and raised several more plates about three feet into the canopy.

The researchers also swept nets over the brush hundreds of times, collecting the critters that crawled through the vegetation. Each technique revealed the biomass (the dry weight of all the captured invertebrates) had significantly decreased from 1976 to the present day. The sweep sample biomass decreased to a fourth or an eighth of what it had been. Between January 1977 and January 2013, the catch rate in the sticky ground traps fell 60-fold. “Everything is dropping,” Lister said. The most common invertebrates in the rain forest — the moths, the butterflies, the grasshoppers, the spiders and others — are all far less abundant. “Holy crap,” Wagner said of the 60-fold loss.


Comparison of the average dry-weight biomass of arthropods caught per 12-h day in 10 ground (A) and canopy (B) traps within the same sampling area in the Luquillo rainforest.

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If there are no insects left, who cares about deficits? What’s the use?

America’s Budget Deficit Jumps By 17% As Spending Surges (CNBC)

The U.S. federal budget deficit rose in fiscal 2018 to the highest level in six years as spending climbed, the Trump administration said Monday. The deficit jumped to $779 billion, $113 billion or 17 percent higher than the previous fiscal period, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney. It was larger than any year since 2012, when it topped $1 trillion. The budget shortfall rose to 3.9 percent of U.S. GDP. The deficit increased by $70 billion less than anticipated in a report published in July, according to the two officials.

Federal revenue rose only slightly, by $14 billion after Republicans chopped tax rates for corporations and most individuals. Outlays climbed by $127 billion, or 3.2 percent. A spike in defense spending, as well as increases for Medicaid, Social Security and disaster relief, contributed to the increase.

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“If the goal was to bail out the banks at public expense (and it was) it’s clear Bernanke had a far better plan than the ECB.”

More Free Money: A Carry Trade in Liquidity (Mish)

Not only do banks earn free money on excess reserves, they can borrow money and make guaranteed free money on that.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis discusses the Carry Trade in Liquidity: “The IOER [interest on excess reserves] has been the effective ceiling of other short-term interest rates. The figure above compares the IOER with overnight rates on deposits and repos. As we can see, the IOER has mostly remained above these two rates, implying that (at least some) banks have been able to borrow funds overnight, deposit them at the Fed and earn a spread, in essence engaging in carry trade in liquidity markets.”

How Much Free Money?

While the Fed has been busy giving banks free money by paying interest on excess reserves, banks in the EU have suffered with negative interest rates, essentially taking money from banks and making them more insolvent. If the goal was to bail out the banks at public expense (and it was), it’s clear Bernanke had a far better plan than the ECB.

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The Fed’s been flying blind at least since Bernanke talked about ‘entering uncharted territory’. That’s what that means.

Powell Has Lost His North Star, And The Fed Is Flying Blind (MW)

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is in an unenviable position. Folks expect him to fine-tune interest rates to keep the economy going and inflation tame but he can’t make things much better — only worse. Growth is nearly 3% and unemployment is at its lowest level since 1969. What inflation we have above the Fed target of 2% is driven largely by oil prices and those by forces beyond the influence of U.S. economic conditions — OPEC politics, U.S. sanctions on Iran, and dystopian political forces in Venezuela and a few other garden spots. When the current turbulence in oil markets recedes, we are likely in for a period of headline inflation below 2%, just as those forces are now driving prices higher now.

Overall, long-term inflation has settled in at the Fed target of about 2%. The Fed should not obsess about it but keep a watchful eye. Amid all this, Powell’s inflation compass has gone missing. The Phillips curve, as he puts it, may not be dead but just resting. To my thinking, it’s in a coma if it was ever alive at all. That contraption is a shorthand equation sitting atop a pyramid of more fundamental behavioral relationships. Those include the supply and demand for domestic workers and in turn, an historically large contingent labor force of healthy prime-age adults sitting on the sidelines, the shifting skill requirements of a workplace transformed by artificial intelligence and robotics, import prices influenced by weak growth in Europe and China, and immigration.

Of course, Mariner Powell has his North Star — what economists affectionately call R* (R-Star), but it is no longer at a fixed position in Powell’s sky. R* is the federal funds rate that neither encourages the economy to speed up or slow down. However, with businesses needing much less capital to get started or grow these days and for decades China and Germany—the second and fourth largest economies globally—racking up current account surpluses and savings to invest abroad, it is no wonder the forces of supply and demand have been driving R* down to historically low levels.

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They use what they don’t pay in taxes, to spy on you.

Facebook Paid £15.8 Million In UK Tax On £1.2 Billion In 2017 Revenues (BBC)

Facebook’s UK tax bill has tripled to £15.8m – but the social media giant will see an immediate cut because of a tax credit. The final bill comes to £7.4m, since Facebook will see tax relief of £8.4m after awarding shares to employees. In 2016, Facebook’s tax bill rose to £5.1m, following a major overhaul of the social media firm’s tax structure. However, the company’s profits only climbed by £4m year-on-year from £58.4m to £62.7m in 2017. The company’s UK office provides marketing services and sales and engineering support to the company. Facebook’s revenue rose by a third year-on-year to £1.2bn in 2017, because of increased revenues from inter-company and advertising reseller services in 2017.

“We have changed the way we report tax so that revenue from customers supported by our UK teams is recorded in the UK and any taxable profit is subject to UK corporation tax,” said Facebook’s Northern Europe vice-president, Steve Hatch. [..] The publication of Facebook’s 2017 tax accounts follows extensive criticism from policymakers and the media over the last 12 months of how much tax tech giants typically pay in Europe. Large technology companies have been condemned for moving sales through other countries and paying modest amounts of tax in the UK.

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Hard to gauge what exactly this means, time must tell. Seems good that they talk of medical help. but will he be able to get it?

Ecuador To Assange: No Talking Politics, Pay Own Bills, Look After Cat (RT)

WikiLeaks supporters were thrilled to hear that Ecuador would restore Julian Assange’s internet connection. But his hosts – who have in some ways become his jailers – reportedly imposed a long list of restrictions on his behavior. While stating that he is allowed to exercise his “right of communication and freedom of expression,” a nine-page document already leaked online forbids the journalist from engaging in political activity or doing anything to interfere in the affairs of other states. The document expressly states that Ecuador cannot be held liable for the content of Assange’s communications, but nevertheless prohibits him from engaging in activities that might damage the relationship between Ecuador and other states.

Assange’s communications were cut seven months ago, after he criticized Spanish authorities’ treatment of voters during the Catalan independence referendum. Assange must pay for his own WiFi. He must use only his own devices, absent written government permission, and provide the embassy with serial number, model number, and brand name for those devices. He must also pay for his own medical evaluations, with the option of transferring to a hospital in case of an emergency – an option repeatedly denied him by UK authorities, who refused to guarantee safe passage without arrest in the event of such a transfer. Assange’s health has been the subject of much concern during his six-year confinement in the Embassy.

Visitors are also slapped with new restrictions. They must submit visit requests in writing to the embassy chief, giving their name, nationality, profession and place of work, reason for visiting, email and social media accounts, and even the serial numbers for phones and other devices they wish to bring inside. The new rules even mandate the collection of IMEIs, unique identification numbers specific to a phone handset. While repeat visitors receive a less restrictive screening process, they can have their access revoked at any time without an explanation. All visitor data will be turned over to the Ecuadorian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other unspecified parties.

The restrictions include a threat to use UK police to arrest visitors or seize communications equipment should the journalist violate the lengthy list of rules. Adding insult to injury, the embassy threatened to remove Assange’s cat to a shelter should they decide he is not cleaning up after the animal properly.

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They lost two years doing nothing but fight amongst themselves. That time was always badly needed.

Brexit Deal Slipping To December Amid Deadlocked Talks (Ind.)

A Brexit deal now looks unlikely until just before Christmas after Theresa May admitted “weeks” may be needed to break the deadlock in talks with Brussels. The delay was also signalled by Ireland’s prime minister who warned of log-jammed negotiations dragging into December, increasing concern that stalled talks could simply collapse into a “disaster” no-deal situation. In a veiled swipe at Brexiteers, European Council President Donald Tusk said solving the vexed issue of the Irish border had proved “more complicated than some may have expected” and said no deal is now “more likely than ever”.

A further sign of slippage came when the EU confirmed it would take a decision this week on whether a special summit once proposed for November to publicly seal a Brexit deal, will be needed given the state of talks. But despite the deadlock, Ms May again came under intense pressure from Conservative Eurosceptics to refuse anything resembling the EU’s proposals, amid signs she is diluting her stance to secure a deal. The October summit was once supposed to be the moment a withdrawal deal was locked in, with expectations already having slipped to a potential specially arranged meeting in November – even under those circumstances the outline would have had to have been agreed at this week’s meeting.

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More likely by the day.

No-Deal Brexit Is ‘More Likely Than Ever Before’ – Tusk (Ind.)

A no-deal Brexit is “more likely than ever before”, the president of the European Council has warned, ahead of a make-or-break summit of EU leaders in Brussels. Donald Tusk, who has described this week’s top-level meeting as “the moment of truth”, said Brexit had “proven to be more complicated than some may have expected”. But he said that “that we are preparing for a no-deal scenario must not, under any circumstances, lead us away from making every effort to reach the best agreement possible”.

Mr Tusk’s warning, made in a letter to EU leaders formally inviting them to the summit, comes a day after negotiations between the European Commission and UK Government hit a a wall over the question of how to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. Over dinner on Wednesday night the heads of state or government of the 27 remaining EU member states will decide whether there is any pointing holding a special Brexit summit in November – or whether the horse has already bolted. It is now confirmed that Theresa May will address the 27 leaders before the dinner in a last-ditch bid to win them over; though she will not be allowed into the main discussion itself.

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Russia and Assad delayed their final offensive to offer the jihadists a way out. But now these are refusing to leave.

Syria’s Chessboard (Hallinan)

The Syrian civil war has always been devilishly complex, with multiple actors following different scripts, but in the past few months it appeared to be winding down. The Damascus government now controls 60 percent of the country and the major population centers, the Islamic State has been routed, and the rebels opposed to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are largely cornered in Idilb Province in the country’s northwest. But suddenly the Americans moved the goal posts—maybe—the Russians have fallen out with the Israelis, the Iranians are digging in their heels, and the Turks are trying to multi-task with a home front in disarray. So the devil is still very much at work in a war that has lasted more than seven years, claimed up to 500,000 lives, displaced millions of people, destabilized an already fragile Middle East, and is far from over.

There are at least three theaters in the Syrian war, each with its own complexities: Idilb in the north, the territory east of the Euphrates River, and the region that abuts the southern section of the Golan Heights. Just sorting out the antagonists is daunting. Turks, Iranians, Americans and Kurds are the key actors in the east. Russians, Turks, Kurds and Assad are in a temporary standoff in the north. And Iran, Assad and Israel are in a faceoff near Golan, a conflict that has suddenly drawn in Moscow. Assad’s goals are straightforward: reunite the country under the rule of Damascus and begin re-building Syria’s shattered cities. The major roadblock to this is Idilb, the last large concentration of anti-Assad groups, Jihadists linked with al-Qaeda, and a modest Turkish occupation force representing Operation Olive Branch. The province, which borders Turkey in the north, is mountainous and re-taking it promises to be difficult.

For the time being there is a stand down. The Russians cut a deal with Turkey to demilitarize the area around Idilb city, neutralize the jihadist groups, and re-open major roads. The agreement holds off a joint Assad-Russian assault on Idilb, which would have driven hundreds of thousands of refugees into Turkey and likely have resulted in large numbers of civilian casualties. But the agreement is temporary—about a month—because Russia is impatient to end the fighting and begin the reconstruction. However, it is hard to see how the Turks are going to get a handle on the bewildering number of groups packed into the province, some of which they have actively aided for years. Ankara could bring in more soldiers, but Turkey already has troops east of the Euphrates and is teetering on the edge of a major economic crisis.

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Nov 132017
 
 November 13, 2017  Posted by at 9:42 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab 1894

 

John Hussman Forecasts A Decade Of Stock Losses (BI)
One In Five American Households Have ‘Zero Or Negative’ Wealth (MW)
Top Tech Stocks’ $1.7 Trillion Gain Eclipses Canada’s Economy (BBG)
Bitcoin Plunges 29% From Record High (BBG)
The End Of “The End Of History” (Luongo)
Warnings From the “China Beige Book” (Rickards)
UK Government Tensions Rise After Leak Of ‘Orwellian’ Memo Sent To May (G.)
More Than A Third Of UK Home Sellers Cut Asking Price (G.)
Fossil Fuel Burning Set To Hit Record High In 2017 (G.)
The Decisions Behind Monsanto’s Weed-Killer Crisis (R.)
Weed-Killer Prompts Angry Divide Among US Farmers (AFP)
Millions On Brink Of Famine In Yemen As Saudi Arabia Tightens Blockade (G.)

 

 

Big fall, big rise and an even bigger fall.

John Hussman Forecasts A Decade Of Stock Losses (BI)

As the equity bull market has climbed into rarefied air, investors have continuously come up with new ways to rationalize the rally. Right now, they like to cite earnings growth, which has expanded for several quarters after a prolonged rough patch. They also frequently mention interest rates that, despite hawkish signals from central banks, have remained low, supplying the market with a seemingly endless supply of cheap money. On the other side of the spectrum, John Hussman, the president of the Hussman Investment Trust and a former economics professor, thinks that the investment community is unwisely ignoring the most stretched valuations in history on the heels of a nearly 300% bull market run. Ever the outspoken bear, Hussman says investors are being willfully ignorant, which has stocks at risk of a drop that could reach 63% and send the market spiraling into a full decade of negative returns.

It wouldn’t be the first time in history this has happened. But Hussman thinks this crash will be different, because the reasons for market instability are “purely psychological” this time around, according to a recent blog post. At the root of Hussman’s pessimistic market view are stock valuations that look historically stretched by a handful of measures. According to his preferred valuation metric — the ratio of non-financial market cap to corporate gross value-added (Market Cap/GVA) — stocks are more expensive than they were in 1929 and 2000, periods that immediately preceded major market selloffs. “US equity market valuations at the most offensive levels in history,” he wrote in his November monthly note. “We expect that more extreme valuations will only be met by more severe losses.”

Those losses won’t just include the 63% plunge referenced above – it’ll also be accompanied by a longer 10 to 12 year period over which the S&P 500 will fall, says Hussman. He cites the chart below, which shows how closely 12-year expected returns for the benchmark have historically tracked Market Cap/GVA, which is shown in inverted fashion. Note that the expected trajectory for Market Cap/GVA shows the S&P 500 veering into negative territory. The psychology behind the market’s willingness to accept lofty stock valuations stems from the flawed rationale that prices are justified by low interest rates, says Hussman. To him, the US economy is growing too slowly for this to be true, and that any belief to the contrary gives people false confidence.

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While other reports say some 70% live paycheck to paycheck. Which one is true? At least it should be clear that the US is not doing well at all.

One In Five American Households Have ‘Zero Or Negative’ Wealth (MW)

Millions of Americans are living on the edge. One in five households has zero or negative wealth, according to a report released this week by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank based in Washington, D.C. What’s more, an even greater share of African-American (30%) and Latino (27%) households are “underwater” financially. The combined impact of $1 trillion in credit-card debt, $1.4 trillion in student loan debt, and stagnant wages are taking a toll. U.S. homes have regained value since the Great Recession, but many households have not. “Millions of American families struggle with zero or negative wealth, meaning they owe more than they own,” the report found. “This means that they have nothing to fall back on if an unexpected expense comes up like a broken down car or illness.” And inequality could get worse through new tax cuts for the wealthy.

President Trump’s tax proposals won’t give America’s middle class the reprieve they need to grow their wealth and recover from the financial crash, said Josh Hoxie, who heads up the Project on Opportunity and Taxation at the Institute for Policy Studies. A recent analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that taxes would decline for all income groups, with the biggest percentage-point decline for millionaires. After-tax income would rise by nearly 7% for households earning over $1 million per year, compared to less than 2% for those earning between $50,001 and $1 million, as MarketWatch recently reported. And less than 1% for those earning less than $50,000, according to Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore IS investment banking advisory firm who worked in the Treasury Department under President Obama.

Looking at private income, such as earnings and dividends, and government benefits like Social Security, the income of families near the top increased roughly 90% from 1963 to 2016, while the income of families at the bottom rose less than 10%, according to a separate report released last month by the Urban Institute, a nonprofit policy group based in Washington, D.C., while most other groups have been left behind. And that gap between rich and poor is only going to get worse, Hoxie said. The wealthiest 25 individuals in the U.S., including co-founder Bill Gates, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, own $1 trillion in combined assets. These 25 — a group equivalent to the active roster of a major league baseball team — hold more wealth than the bottom 56% of the U.S. population.

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Completely nuts.

Top Tech Stocks’ $1.7 Trillion Gain Eclipses Canada’s Economy (BBG)

Between the FAANG quintet and China’s rivaling BAT companies, gains in the world’s top technology shares are nearing a whopping $1.7 trillion in market value this year. That’s more than Canada’s entire economy, and exceeds the worth of Germany’s biggest 30 companies put together. The eight tech giants – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google parent Alphabet, as well as their Asian peers Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – have amassed as much money in 2017 as PIMCO, one of the world’s biggest fund managers, has done in about 46 years. While the stocks have seen a meteoric rise this year, their combined market value came off highs last week amid a global selloff in which the year’s high flyers had a bigger retreat. A recent breakdown in the correlation between high-yield bonds and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 Index suggests the slide in junk may spread further.

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Confidence.

Bitcoin Plunges 29% From Record High (BBG)

Bitcoin plunged as the cancellation of a technology upgrade prompted some users to switch out of the cryptocurrency, spooking speculators who had profited from a more than 800% surge this year. The cryptocurrency has dropped 9.5% since late Friday, extending its slide from last week’s record to as much as 29%, according to data compiled by Coinmarketcap.com and Bloomberg. Bitcoin cash, a rival that split from the original bitcoin in August, has jumped nearly 40% since Friday. Bitcoin cash is gaining popularity because of its larger block size, a characteristic that makes transactions cheaper and faster than the original. When a faction of the cryptocurrency community canceled plans to increase bitcoin’s block size on Wednesday – a move that would have created another offshoot – some supporters of bigger blocks rallied around bitcoin cash.

The resulting volatility has been extreme even by bitcoin’s wild standards and comes amid growing interest in cryptocurrencies among regulators, banks and fund managers. While skeptics have called bitcoin’s rapid advance a bubble, it has become too big for many on Wall Street to ignore. Even after shrinking by as much as $38 billion since Wednesday, bitcoin boasts a market value of $101 billion. Supporters of bitcoin’s technology upgrade “are now switching support to bitcoin cash,” said Mike Kayamori, head of Tokyo-based Quoine, the world’s second most-active bitcoin exchange over the past day. “There’s a panic about what’s happening. People shouldn’t panic. Just hold on to both coins until we see how it plays out.”

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A different view from most.

The End Of “The End Of History” (Luongo)

The path to draining the swamp is a circuitous one but, in my mind, it’s hard to argue where things are headed. They are not headed towards confrontation with Iran but actually the opposite. The most rabidly anti-Iranian segment of the Saudi Royal house is impoverished and imprisoned. CNN will be sold and go out of business to allow for the Time-Warner/AT&T merger. Jeff Zucker is out. Add another scalp to Steve Bannon’s belt along with Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and so many to come. Will the vestiges of the neoconservative establishment in the U.S. and Israel continue to sabre-rattle and try to undermine what is happening? Yes.

They’ve been doing that since the day Trump was elected just over a year ago, but it hasn’t stopped the momentum. Why? Because Putin was on the job outmaneuvering them at every turn. Trump made a deal with the neocons back in August to cede them control of foreign policy and, in effect, outsourced cleaning up the Middle East to Putin. But, predictably they also didn’t follow through with their end of the bargain. Trump learned, like Putin did, the John McCain’s of the world don’t keep to their deals. They are ‘not agreement capable.’ And, as such, since the last failure to repeal Obamacare Trump has gone after every pillar of support these people had. It will end with Hillary Clinton’s indictment. But in the meantime it will look like the world is on the brink of world war.

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“Xi is ready to undertake reform of the financial system, which means shutting down insolvent companies and banks.”

Warnings From the “China Beige Book” (Rickards)

The China Beige Book, CBB, says that China had been covering up and smoothing over problems related to weak growth and excessive debt in order to provide a calm face to the world in advance of the National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which took place last month. CBB also makes it clear that the much-touted “rebalancing” of the Chinese economy away from investment and manufacturing toward consumption and spending has not occurred. Instead China has doubled down on excess capacity in coal, steel and manufacturing and has continued its policy of wasteful investment fueled with unpayable debt. It’s become obvious that the first cracks are starting to appear in China’s Great Wall of Debt. The Chinese debt binge of the past 10 years is a well-known story.

Chinese corporations have incurred dollar-denominated debts in the hundreds of billions of dollars, most of which are unpayable without subsidies from Beijing. China’s debt-to-equity ratio is over 300%, far worse than America’s (which is also dangerously high) and comparable to that of Japan and other all-star debtors. China’s trillion-dollar wealth management product (WMP) market is basically a Ponzi scheme. New WMPs are used to redeem maturing WMPs, while most of the market is simply rolled over because the underlying real estate and infrastructure projects cannot possibly repay their debts. A lot of corporate lending is simply one company lending to another, which in turns lends to another, giving the outward appearance of every company holding good assets, but in which none of the companies can actually pay its creditors.

It’s an accounting game with no real money behind it and no chance of repayment. All of this is well-known. What is not known is when it will end. When will confidence be lost in such a way that the entire debt house of cards crumbles? When will a geopolitical shock or natural disaster trigger a loss of confidence that ignites a financial panic? There was little prospect of this in the past year because President Xi Jinping was keeping a lid on trouble before the recently concluded National Congress of the Communist Party of China. With the congress behind him, Xi is ready to undertake reform of the financial system, which means shutting down insolvent companies and banks. Now the first bankruptcies have begun to appear.

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None of these people give one hoot about their country. They care about themselves only.

UK Government Tensions Rise After Leak Of ‘Orwellian’ Memo Sent To May (G.)

The tensions in Theresa May’s government intensified on Sunday night ahead of this week’s vital votes on the Brexit bill, as ministers accused Boris Johnson and Michael Gove of sending an “Orwellian” set of secret demands to No 10. As an increasingly weakened prime minister faces the possibility of parliamentary defeats on the bill, government colleagues have said they are aghast at the language used by the foreign secretary and the environment secretary in a joint private letter. The leaked letter – a remarkable show of unity from two ministers who infamously fell out during last year’s leadership campaign – appeared to be designed to push May decisively towards a hard Brexit and limit the influence of former remainers. It complained of “insufficient energy” on Brexit in some parts of the government and insisted any transition period must end in June 2021 – a veiled attack on the chancellor, Philip Hammond.

They urged the prime minister to ensure members of her top team fall behind their Brexit plans by “clarifying their minds” and called for them to “internalise the logic”. But the leak drew a bitter response from supporters of a soft Brexit, who suggested that May would now be forced to either discipline the pair or further weaken her position, which has already been tested by the recent resignations of Priti Patel and Michael Fallon and continuing pressure on Johnson and Damian Green. One cabinet minister told the Guardian: “It is not surprising that they [Gove and Johnson] would express their view. But what is surprising is that they would write this down and use this kind of language in a letter to the prime minister. “Some have described it as Orwellian, and it is. It is not helpful when people try and press their views in untransparent way.”

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It’s just starting. London falling.

More Than A Third Of UK Home Sellers Cut Asking Price (G.)

More than a third of home owners trying to sell their house have been forced to reduce their asking price, with the number of price cuts at their highest level since 2012, according to Rightmove. Traditionally house sellers are often forced to cut asking prices in the pre-Christmas period but this year the nation appears to be holding a collective autumn sale, said the property website. Rightmove, which claims to list 90% of the houses being sold in the UK, said 37% of current sellers had dropped their asking price, with a typical 0.8% or £2,392 price reduction. It also warned that those who recently put their property on the market were being too optimistic by not discounting by more. The mass price cut will be seen as further evidence that the market has slowed dramatically, particularly in London where prices have been falling.

Last week the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors said the overall UK property market had stalled. Rics also warned that it expected the market to remain subdued in the coming months as sales stay flat or fall in most regions. Rightmove director, Miles Shipside, said the slowdown in the housing market, the recent interest rate rise and the prediction that further rises were on the horizon suggested bigger reductions in house prices in the near future. “Given that the market has been price-sensitive for a while and a five-year high proportion of sellers are slashing their prices, some sellers and their agents are over-pricing. These sellers may well be asking themselves if they could have saved some time and stress by pricing a lot more conservatively at the start.”

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As you’re being pleasantly entertained with that dumb Paris agreement.

Fossil Fuel Burning Set To Hit Record High In 2017 (G.)

The burning of fossil fuels around the world is set to hit a record high in 2017, climate scientists have warned, following three years of flat growth that raised hopes that a peak in global emissions had been reached. The expected jump in the carbon emissions that drive global warming is a “giant leap backwards for humankind”, according to some scientists. However, other experts said they were not alarmed, saying fluctuations in emissions are to be expected and that big polluters such as China are acting to cut emissions. Global emissions need to reach their peak by 2020 and then start falling quickly in order to have a realistic chance of keeping global warming below the 2C danger limit, according to leading scientists. Whether the anticipated increase in CO2 emissions in 2017 is just a blip that is followed by a falling trend, or is the start of a worrying upward trend, remains to be seen.

Much will depend on the fast implementation of the global climate deal sealed in Paris in 2015 and this is the focus of the UN summit of the world’s countries in Bonn, Germany this week. The nations must make significant progress in turning the aspirations of the Paris deal into reality, as the action pledged to date would see at least 3C of warming and increasing extreme weather impacts around the world. The 12th annual Global Carbon Budget report published on Monday is produced by 76 of the world’s leading emissions experts from 57 research institutions and estimates that global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will have risen by 2% by the end of 2017, a significant rise.

“Global CO2 emissions appear to be going up strongly once again after a three-year stable period. This is very disappointing,” said Prof Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the UK’s University of East Anglia and who led the new research. “The urgency for reducing emissions means they should really be already decreasing now.” “There was a big push to sign the Paris agreement on climate change but there is a feeling that not very much has happened since, a bit of slackening,” she said. “What happens after 2017 is very open and depends on how much effort countries are going to make. It is time to take really seriously the implementation of the Paris agreement.” She said the hurricanes and floods seen in 2017 were “a window into the future”.

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Farmers are using dicamba because they get it on their crops anyway from the neighbors. There’s not much time left to stop Monsanto from effectively owning all our food.

The Decisions Behind Monsanto’s Weed-Killer Crisis (R.)

In early 2016, agri-business giant Monsanto faced a decision that would prove pivotal in what since has become a sprawling herbicide crisis, with millions of acres of crops damaged. Monsanto had readied new genetically modified soybeans seeds. They were engineered for use with a powerful new weed-killer that contained a chemical called dicamba but aimed to control the substance’s main shortcoming: a tendency to drift into neighboring farmers’ fields and kill vegetation. The company had to choose whether to immediately start selling the seeds or wait for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to sign off on the safety of the companion herbicide. The firm stood to lose a lot of money by waiting.

Because Monsanto had bred the dicamba-resistant trait into its entire stock of soybeans, the only alternative would have been “to not sell a single soybean in the United States” that year, Monsanto Vice President of Global Strategy Scott Partridge told Reuters in an interview. Betting on a quick approval, Monsanto sold the seeds, and farmers planted a million acres of the genetically modified soybeans in 2016. But the EPA’s deliberations on the weed-killer dragged on for another 11 months because of concerns about dicamba’s historical drift problems. That delay left farmers who bought the seeds with no matching herbicide and three bad alternatives: Hire workers to pull weeds; use the less-effective herbicide glyphosate; or illegally spray an older version of dicamba at the risk of damage to nearby farms.

The resulting rash of illegal spraying that year damaged 42,000 acres of crops in Missouri, among the hardest hit areas, as well as swaths of crops in nine other states, according to an August 2016 advisory from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The damage this year has covered 3.6 million acres in 25 states, according to Kevin Bradley, a University of Missouri weed scientist who has tracked dicamba damage reports and produced estimates cited by the EPA. The episode highlights a hole in a U.S regulatory system that has separate agencies approving genetically modified seeds and their matching herbicides.

Monsanto has blamed farmers for the illegal spraying and argued it could not have foreseen that the disjointed approval process would set off a crop-damage crisis. But a Reuters review of regulatory records and interviews with crop scientists shows that Monsanto was repeatedly warned by crop scientists, starting as far back as 2011, of the dangers of releasing a dicamba-resistant seed without an accompanying herbicide designed to reduce drift to nearby farms.

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“Farmers need it desperately,” said Perry Galloway. “If I get dicamba on (my products), I can’t sell anything,” responded Shawn Peebles.”

Weed-Killer Prompts Angry Divide Among US Farmers (AFP)

When it comes to the herbicide dicamba, farmers in the southern state of Arkansas are not lacking for strong opinions. “Farmers need it desperately,” said Perry Galloway. “If I get dicamba on (my products), I can’t sell anything,” responded Shawn Peebles. The two men know each other well, living just miles apart in the towns of Gregory and Augusta, in a corner of the state where cotton and soybean fields reach to the horizon and homes are often miles from the nearest neighbor. But they disagree profoundly on the use of dicamba. Last year the agro-chemical giant Monsanto began selling soy and cotton seeds genetically modified to tolerate the herbicide. The chemical product has been used to great effect against a weed that plagues the region, Palmer amaranth, or pigweed – especially since it became resistant to another herbicide, glyphosate, which has become highly controversial in Europe over its effects on human health.

The problem with dicamba is that it vaporizes easily and is carried by the wind, often spreading to nearby farm fields – with varying effects. Facing a surge in complaints, authorities in Arkansas early this summer imposed an urgent ban on the product’s sale. The state is now poised to ban its use between April 16 and October 31, covering the period after plants have emerged from the soil and when climatic conditions favor dicamba’s dispersal.

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This is who we are. This is caused by people we support, that we call our friends.

Millions On Brink Of Famine In Yemen As Saudi Arabia Tightens Blockade (G.)

Abdulaziz al-Husseinya lies skeletal and appears lifeless in a hospital in Yemen’s western port city of Hodeidah. At the age of nine, he weighs less than one and a half stone, and is one of hundreds of thousands of children in the country suffering from acute malnutrition. Seven million people are on on the brink of famine in war-torn Yemen, which was already in the grip of the world’s worst cholera outbreak when coalition forces led by Saudi Arabia tightened its blockade on the country last week, stemming vital aid flows. Al-Thawra hospital, where Abdulaziz is being treated, is reeling under the pressure of more than two years of conflict between the Saudi-led coalition and Iranian-allied Houthi rebels. Its corridors are packed, with patients now coming from five surrounding governorates to wait elbow-to-elbow for treatment.

Less than 45% of the country’s medical facilities are still operating – most have closed due to fighting or a lack of funds, or have been bombed by coalition airstrikes. As a result, Al-Thawra is treating some 2,500 people a day, compared to 700 before the conflict escalated in March 2015. [..] Aid agencies are now warning that Yemen’s already catastrophic humanitarian crisis could soon become a “nightmare scenario” if Saudi Arabia does not ease the blockade of the country’s land, sea and air ports – a move that the kingdom insists is necessary after Houthi rebels fired a ballistic missile towards Riyadh’s international airport this month. United Nations humanitarian flights have been cancelled for the past week and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), along with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), have been prevented from flying vital medical assistance into the country.

More than 20 million Yemenis – over 70% of the population – are in need of humanitarian assistance that is being blocked. Following international pressure, the major ports of Aden and Mukalla were reopened last week for commercial traffic and food supplies, along with land border crossings to neighbouring Oman and Saudi Arabia, but humanitarian aid and aid agency workers remained barred from entering the country on Sunday. UN aid chief Mark Lowcock has said if the restrictions remain, Yemen will face “the largest famine the world has seen for many decades, with millions of victims”.

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Apr 072017
 


Fred Stein Times Square at Night 1947

 

Eyewitness Says Syrian Military Anticipated US Raid (ABC)
The Biggest Stock Bubble In US History (IRD)
The Unavoidable Pension Crisis (Roberts)
Americans Are Taking Out The Largest Mortgages On Record (MW)
Global Debt Explodes At ‘Eye-Watering’ Pace To Hit £170 Trillion (Tel.)
Wall Street Doubts Trump Wants to Split Up Biggest US Banks (BBG)
Fed’s Asset Shift To Pose New Test Of Economy’s Recovery, Resilience (R.)
M5S Plans To ‘Revolutionize Democracy’ With Online Voting, E-petitions (LI)
Arms Sales Becoming France’s New El Dorado, But At What Cost? (F24)
Guns Are The True Cause Of Hunger And Famine (G.)
Greece’s Dark Age: How Austerity Turned Off The Lights (R.)
On Dimitris Christoulas: ‘He Is A Part Of History Now’ (AlJ)

 

 

“I think Secretary of Defense [General] James Mattis gave the president a list of options, this being the smallest…”

Eyewitness Says Syrian Military Anticipated US Raid (ABC)

Syrian military officials appeared to anticipate Thursday’s night raid on Syria’s Shayrat airbase, evacuating personnel and moving equipment ahead of the strike, according to an eyewitness to the strike. Dozens of Tomahawk missiles struck the airbase near Homs damaging runways, towers and traffic control buildings, a local resident and human rights activist living near the airbase told ABC News via an interpreter. U.S. officals believe the plane that dropped chemical weapons on civilians in Idlib Province on Tuesday, which according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights killed 86 people, took off from the Shayrat airbase. The attack lasted approximately 35 minutes and its impact was felt across the city, shaking houses and sending those inside them fleeing from their windows. Both of the airport’s major runways were struck by missiles, and some of its 40 fortified bunkers were also damaged.

Local residents say the Russian military had used the airbase in early 2016 but have since withdrawn their officers, so the base is now mainly operated by Syrian and Iranian military officers. There is also a hotel near the airport where Iranian officers have been staying, though it was not clear whether it was damaged. The eyewitness believes human casualties, at least within the civilian population, were minimal, as there was no traffic heading toward the local hospital. [..] Former National Security Adviser and ABC News contributor Richard Clarke said this attack, one of the quickest displays of force by a new president in recent history, is largely “symbolic.”

Following a 2013 chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1400 people outside of Damascus which a U.S. government intelligence assessment concluded likely used a nerve agent, the Obama administration threatened retaliation but ultimately called off planned airstrikes after Assad agreed to turn over the majority of his chemical weapons arsenal to an international watchdog group. Trump has attempted to blame Obama’s “weakness” for the worsening violence in Syria. “This attack on one air base seems more symbolic,” Clarke said. “I think Secretary of Defense [General] James Mattis gave the president a list of options, this being the smallest. It was a targeted attack not designed to overwhelm the Syrian military … I think the president was trying to differentiate himself from his predecessor.”

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“Tesla has never made money and never will make money. Next to Amazon, it’s the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history.”

The Biggest Stock Bubble In US History (IRD)

Please note, many will argue that the p/e ratio on the S&P 500 was higher in 1999 than it is now. However, there’s two problems with the comparison. First, when there is no “e,” price does not matter. Many of the tech stocks in the SPX in 1999 did not have any earnings and never had a chance to produce earnings because many of them went out of business. However – and I’ve been saying this for quite some time and I’m finally seeing a few others make the same assertion – if you adjust the current earnings of the companies in SPX using the GAAP accounting standards in force in 1999, the current earnings in aggregate would likely be cut at least in half. And thus, the current p/e ratio expressed in 1999 earnings terms likely would be at least as high as the p/e ratio in 1999, if not higher. (Changes to GAAP have made it easier for companies to create non-cash earnings, reclassify and capitalize expenses, stretch out depreciation and pension funding costs, etc).

We talk about the tech bubble that fomented in the late 1990’s that resulted in an 85% (roughly) decline on the NASDAQ. Currently the five highest valued stocks by market cap are tech stocks: AAPL, GOOG, MSFT, AMZN and FB. Combined, these five stocks make-up nearly 10% of the total value of the entire stock market. Money from the public poured into ETFs at record pace in February. The majority of it into S&P 500 ETFs which then have to put that money proportionately by market value into each of the S&P 500 stocks. Thus when cash pours into SPX funds like this, a large rise in the the top five stocks by market cap listed above becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The price rise in these stocks has nothing remotely to do with fundamentals. Take Microsoft, for example (MSFT). Last Friday the pom-poms were waving on Fox Business because MSFT hit an all-time high.

This is in spite of the fact that MSFT’s revenues dropped 8.8% from 2015 to 2016 and its gross margin plunged 13.2%. So much for fundamentals. In addition to the onslaught of retail cash moving blindly into stocks, margin debt on the NYSE hit an all-time high in February. Both the cash flow and margin debt statistics are flashing a big red warning signal, as this only occurs when the public becomes blind to risk and and bet that stocks can only go up. As I’ve said before, this is by far the most dangerous stock market in my professional lifetime (32 years, not including my high years spent reading my father’s Wall Street Journal everyday and playing penny stocks).

Perhaps the loudest bell ringing and signaling a top is the market’s valuation of Tesla. On Monday the market cap of Tesla ($49 billion) surpassed Ford’s market cap ($45 billion) despite the fact that Tesla delivered 79 thousand cars in 2016 while Ford delivered 2.6 million. “Electric Jeff” (as a good friend of mine calls Elon Musk, in reference to Jeff Bezos) was on Twitter Monday taunting short sellers. At best his behavior can be called “gauche.” Musk, similar to Bezos, is a masterful stock operator. Jordan Belfort (the “Wolf of Wall Street”) was a small-time dime store thief compared to Musk and Bezos. Tesla has never made money and never will make money. Next to Amazon, it’s the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. Without the massive tax credits given to the first 200,000 buyers of Tesla vehicles, the Company would likely be out of business by now.

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And to think even without demographics pensions look screwed too, just from financial engineering and insane debt levels.

The Unavoidable Pension Crisis (Roberts)

There is a really big crisis coming. Think about it this way. After 8 years and a 230% stock market advance the pension funds of Dallas, Chicago, and Houston are in severe trouble. But it isn’t just these municipalities that are in trouble, but also most of the public and private pensions that still operate in the country today. Currently, many pension funds, like the one in Houston, are scrambling to slightly lower return rates, issue debt, raise taxes or increase contribution limits to fill some of the gaping holes of underfunded liabilities in their plans. The hope is such measures combined with an ongoing bull market, and increased participant contributions, will heal the plans in the future. This is not likely to be the case. This problem is not something born of the last “financial crisis,” but rather the culmination of 20-plus years of financial mismanagement.

An April 2016 Moody’s analysis pegged the total 75-year unfunded liability for all state and local pension plans at $3.5 trillion. That’s the amount not covered by current fund assets, future expected contributions, and investment returns at assumed rates ranging from 3.7% to 4.1%. Another calculation from the American Enterprise Institute comes up with $5.2 trillion, presuming that long-term bond yields average 2.6%. With employee contribution requirements extremely low, averaging about 15% of payroll, the need to stretch for higher rates of return have put pensions in a precarious position and increases the underfunded status of pensions. With pension funds already wrestling with largely underfunded liabilities, the shifting demographics are further complicating funding problems.

One of the primary problems continues to be the decline in the ratio of workers per retiree as retirees are living longer (increasing the relative number of retirees), and lower birth rates (decreasing the relative number of workers.) However, this “support ratio” is not only declining in the U.S. but also in much of the developed world. This is due to two demographic factors: increased life expectancy coupled with a fixed retirement age, and a decrease in the fertility rate. In 1950, there were 7.2 people aged 20–64 for every person of 65 or over in the OECD countries. By 1980, the support ratio dropped to 5.1 and by 2010 it was 4.1. It is projected to reach just 2.1 by 2050. The table below shows support ratios for selected countries in 1970, 2010, and projected for 2050:

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Happy days!

Americans Are Taking Out The Largest Mortgages On Record (MW)

For the past few years, the housing market has been unbalanced. Strong demand and lean supply keep pushing prices higher and higher. On Wednesday, a fresh piece of data confirmed that trend. The Mortgage Bankers Association’s weekly purchase loan data showed that the average size of a home loan was the largest in the history of its survey, which goes back to 1990. Higher prices have a few different effects on the market. Buyers have to make tradeoffs on the kinds of homes they can afford, or may be shut out of ownership altogether. They may also adjust their borrowing. Larger mortgage sizes may reflect not just more expensive properties, but also more leveraged ones.

The 20% down payment is a relic: the median down payment in 2016 was 10%. For first-time buyers, it was 6%. First-timers and other buyers of less-expensive homes are more leveraged now than they were at the height of the housing bubble a decade ago. Home loan sizes aren’t the only things that have changed in the years since MBA started its survey. Back at the start of the survey, the median mortgage size was only about 3.3 times the median annual income. It’s now over five times as big – though buyers get bigger homes and lower interest rates.

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Over $70 trillion since 2008.

Global Debt Explodes At ‘Eye-Watering’ Pace To Hit £170 Trillion (Tel.)

Global debt has climbed at an “eye-watering” pace over the past decade, soaring to a fresh high of £170 trillion last year, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF). The IIF said total debt levels, including household, government and corporate debt, climbed by more than $70 trillion over the last 10 years to a record high of $215 trillion (£173 trillion) in 2016 – or the equivalent of 325pc of GDP. It said emerging markets posed “a growing source of concern” to financial stability and the global economy as debt burdens in these countries climb at a rapid pace. The IIF data showed the increase was partly driven by a “spectacular rise” in emerging markets, where total debt stood at $55 trillion at the end of 2016, or 215pc of total emerging market GDP.

Debt has risen from $16 trillion in 2006 and $7.4 trillion in 1996. The body, which represents the world’s top financial institutions, said a wave of maturing debt this year presented a “growing refinancing risk”. It estimates that more than $1.1 trillion of emerging market bonds and loans will mature this year, with dollar-denominated debt accounting for a fifth of all redemptions. It said China faced around $40bn of dollar-denominated redemptions this year, while Russia faced redemptions of $20bn. International bodies including the IMF and OECD have warned that rising interest rates in the US could bring an end to an emerging market corporate debt binge as companies in these countries see their debt servicing costs rise in local currency terms. “While risks associated with currency mismatches may not be as acute as during past emerging market debt crises, the overall emerging market debt burden – particularly as global interest rates head higher – is a growing source of concern,” the IIF said in a note.

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Goldman is not a consumer bank. They might actually profit from this.

Wall Street Doubts Trump Wants to Split Up Biggest US Banks (BBG)

President Donald Trump and his advisers have vowed to bring back a Depression-era law that would cleave the biggest U.S. lenders in half by separating commercial and investment banking operations. Wall Street doesn’t expect that to happen. After chief economic adviser Gary Cohn reiterated the administration’s stance toward the Glass-Steagall Act in a private meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday, analysts said they viewed any radical regulatory changes as unlikely. Shares of Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, which would be most affected by the rule, rose Thursday after Bloomberg first reported on Cohn’s comments. Reinstating Glass-Steagall, which was created after the banking crises of the 1930s and repealed in 1999, would require a rewriting of U.S. banking rules. The Dodd-Frank Act took more than a year of work by Congress.

The Trump administration hasn’t put forward a detailed plan and the revisions proposed by House Republicans don’t involve the return of Glass-Steagall. “Anything resembling Glass-Steagall is so far from happening that it’s hard to envision,” said Ian Katz, an analyst at Capital Alpha. “It simply isn’t a priority issue in Congress.” The Republicans who control the House and the Senate want to loosen banking regulations, not make them stricter, Katz wrote. The Republican Party made restoring Glass-Steagall part of its platform, and Trump sometimes criticized the big banks during the campaign, saying “I’m not going to let Wall Street get away with murder.” Since taking office, he’s appointed Cohn and several other former Goldman Sachs bankers to top posts, and said that he’ll look to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon for advice about regulatory reform.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said during his confirmation hearing that he opposes the old Glass-Steagall, but supports a “21st Century” version. He didn’t elaborate on what he meant. “If you’ve listened to all the rhetoric on regulation, we’ve no real guidance on where we are going,” said Christopher Wheeler, an Atlantic Equities analyst in London. “The uncertainty is immense and what you have to believe is that things will continue as they are.” The regulation might not mean that commercial and investment banks have to be separated, Cowen Group analyst Jaret Seiberg wrote in a report. Instead, the government could require that broker-dealers be subsidiaries of holding companies, rather than banks, he said. That would mean that the brokerage arm would have to be separately funded. “Cohn was the most likely obstacle within the Trump White House,” Seiberg wrote. “With him supporting Glass-Steagall’s restoration, there is no one in the inner circle left to fight it.”

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More uncharted territory. We tend to forget, but for 10 years now they’re grasping in the dark. They have no idea what they do, all they have to go on are outdated textbooks that were flawed to begin with. Time to audit the Fed and then close it.

Fed’s Asset Shift To Pose New Test Of Economy’s Recovery, Resilience (R.)

The Federal Reserve’s coming decision to reduce its massive asset holdings will set off a complex dance with global investors and the U.S. Treasury as it tries to put a final end to policies used to fight the 2007 financial crisis without upending the economy along the way. It is a feat with no clear precedent, according to analysts and officials involved in the process: a central bank trying to squeeze trillions of dollars out of markets it has supported for a decade, and in the process likely pushing up the cost of home buying, corporate finance and an array of other activities. Though final decisions have not been made, the Fed may shift policy as soon as the end of this year, and over 2018 begin pulling anywhere from $20 billion to $60 billion a month out of bond markets, according to a review of current Fed asset holdings.

For several years during the crisis, the Fed added to its holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds and securities backed by home mortgages to the tune of $85 billion a month before the program was slowed. The purchases were an emergency measure made necessary because the Fed’s short-term interest rate – its primary tool to encourage people and businesses to spend and invest – had already been cut to zero. With the economy still in freefall, the asset purchases added to demand for financial securities, and are thought to have held down long-term interest rates in general, a boost to the home-building and other industries in particular. The central bank is already raising its short-term interest rate and has managed a series of increases without slowing the economy. When it starts to scale back the size of its $4.5 trillion stockpile of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities – essentially reversing the purchases it made during the crisis – it will pose a stiff new test of the economy’s resilience.

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This was always the plan. Use technology to strengthen democracy.

M5S Plans To ‘Revolutionize Democracy’ With Online Voting, E-petitions (LI)

Italy’s anti-establishment Five Star Movement party plans to introduce online voting and public referendums to increase “democracy and transparency” in the country’s capital. Five Star councillors presented the draft resolution at Rome’s city hall on Monday, where it will be debated. They claimed the proposed ideas would take the city “from Mafia Capitale [the ongoing corruption scandal which has seen dozens of Rome politicians and businessmen put on trial] to direct democracy and transparency in five years”. The ideas suggested included online consultations and participatory budgeting. The latter process would give citizens more say in how Rome money is spent, and has already been introduced by Five Star-led local authorities in some areas, including Mira and Ragusa.

In a blog post, leader Beppe Grillo said that within a year, a Five Star government would introduce public petitions which can be created online and sent directly to the Italian parliament for discussion – a system which already exists in the UK, for example. “It should be the citizens and the local community who govern cities through the Internet, using collective intelligence,” said Grillo. “The web is revolutionizing the relationship between citizens and institutions making direct democracy feasible, as applied in ancient Greece.” Angelo Sturni, one of the councillors behind the proposal, said: “We also want to experiment with electronic voting in referendums, using the American model.” Discontent over widespread corruption in Rome, as revealed in the Mafia Capitale trial, was one of the main factors in Five Star candidate Virginia Raggi’s victory in mayoral elections last June.

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UK, France, Germany, Holland, Belgium: merchants of death. Government sponsored murder.

Arms Sales Becoming France’s New El Dorado, But At What Cost? (F24)

When Qatar agreed to buy 24 French Rafale fighter jets in a €6.3 billion contract at the end of April, it represented yet another major success for France’s arms industry, coming hot on the heels of further multi-billion euro sales of Rafales to Egypt and India. The deals have been hailed by Hollande and his government. According to France’s Minister of Defence Jean-Yves Le Drian, in comments made to the Journal du Dimanche newspaper Sunday, the Qatar contract brought the value of the country’s arms exports to more than €15 billion this year so far. That sum is already more than the €8.06 billion for the whole of 2014, which itself was the highest level seen since 2009 – suggesting a continued upward trajectory for the French arms trade and one that is providing a much-needed salve to the country’s economic woes.

But some of these deals have raised more than a few eyebrows, with anti-arms trade campaigners critical of France’s willingness to sell weapons to countries with less than stellar human rights records. These concerns are only set to rise when Hollande heads first to Doha on Monday and then Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh the day after, where furthering the recent success of the French arms industry is likely to be one of his top priorities. Saudi Arabia has already proved a lucrative trading partner for French arms manufacturers, most recently in a deal signed in November that saw the kingdom buy $3 billion-worth (€2.7 billion) of French weapons and military equipment to supply the Lebanese army. The oil-rich country is currently on something of an arms spending spree. Last year, the Saudis surpassed India to become the world’s biggest arms importer, upping its spending by 54% to €5.8 billion, according to a report by industry analyst IHS.

France, thanks to some adept diplomatic manoeuvering in recent years, is well placed to take advantage of the Saudi cash cow. Paris has been an increasingly close ally of Riyadh ever since it was among the most vocal in backing military intervention against Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, a key ally of Shiite Iran – one of Sunni Saudi Arabia’s main regional rivals. “You’re seeing political fractures across the region, and at the same time you’ve got oil, which allows countries to arm themselves, protect themselves and impose their will as to how they think the region should develop,” Ben Moores, author of the IHS report, told AP in March. France, of course, is not alone in striking lucrative arms deals in the region. The US remains the biggest arms exporter to the Middle East, with $8.4 billion (€7.5 billion) worth of weapon sales in 2014, while the UK and Germany are also major players.

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And this is what the merchants of death leave behind.

Guns Are The True Cause Of Hunger And Famine (G.)

Last year, the World Bank revised its position on conflict – upgrading it from being one of many drivers of suffering and poverty, to being the main driver. In Somalia, despite some political progress the conflict has put more than half the population in need of assistance, with 363,000 children suffering acute malnutrition. In north-east Nigeria, conflict with Boko Haram has left 1.8m people still displaced, farmers unable to grow crops, and 4.8 million people need food. In Yemen, an escalation in conflict since 2015 has worsened a situation already made dire by weak rule of law and governance. Now more than 14 million people need food aid. Only if we understand conflict can we understand hunger. South Sudan is another example. I worked there for two years following the signing of the comprehensive peace agreement in 2005.

Right now a place called Koch, where Mercy Corps works, is in what the famine early warning systems network calls a “level 4 emergency phase”. This means that people will start to die of hunger in a matter of months if they don’t receive enough aid. Until recent years, Koch was a thriving community with fertile land. It has been destroyed in armed clashes since conflict broke out in South Sudan in December 2013. Families have had to move time and time again and disease is rampant due to the lack of clean water. As one father of five told our team in Koch: “My house was burnt, everything was looted and I do not know how to rebuild my life.” Across the places where we work and where people are facing starvation, the pattern is the similar.

Hunger is not some freak environmental event; it is human-made, the result of a deadly mix of conflict, marginalisation and weak governance. Yet watching some of the news and the crisis appeals, one could be forgiven for thinking that what we need is another Live Aid song and airdrops of food. Red Nose Day has been criticised for portraying Africa as a place where “nothing ever grows”. A recent social media campaign to send a plane filled with food to Somalia gathered support: a noble gesture, but not a long-term solution. Mercy Corps’ own emergency response is not the long-term answer either.

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It’s easy to label something ‘theft’, but for Greeks it’s either go illegal or sit in the dark, freeze etc. Still can’t believe this is the European Union.

Greece’s Dark Age: How Austerity Turned Off The Lights (R.)

Kostas Argyros’s unpaid electricity bills are piling up, among a mountain of debt owed to Greece’s biggest power utility. His family owe €850 to the Public Power Corporation (PPC), a tiny fraction of the state-controlled firm’s 2.6 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in unpaid bills. Argyros picks up only occasional work as an odd-job man. “When you only work once a week, what will you pay first?” said the 35-year-old, who lives in a tiny apartment in an Athens suburb with his unemployed wife and four small children. The Argyros family are emblematic of deepening poverty in Greece following seven years of austerity demanded by the country’s international creditors. They burn wood to heat their home in winter, food is cooked on a small gas stove, and hot water is scarce.

The only evening light is the blue glare of a TV screen, for fear of racking up more debt. Five-watt lightbulbs provide a dim glow and Argyros worries about the effect on their eyesight. More than 40% of Greeks are behind on their utility bills, higher than anywhere else in Europe. People in poor neighborhoods are also increasingly turning to energy fraud, meaning that the problem for PPC is much higher than the mountain of unpaid bills suggests. Power theft is costing PPC around €500-600 million a year in lost income, an industry official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to divulge the numbers. Public disclosures by the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator HEDNO, which checks meters, show that verified cases of theft climbed to 10,600 last year, up from 8,880 in 2013 and 4,470 in 2012.

Authorities believe theft is far higher than the cases verified by HEDNO, another official said, declining to be named. Households in the country are equipped with analog meters, which are easy to hack. One of the most common tricks is using magnets, which slow down the rotating coils to show less consumption than the real amount, a HEDNO official said. Some websites even offer consumers tips and tricks on power fraud. For households who have had their electricity cut off, a group of activists calling themselves the “I Won’t Pay” movement have taken it upon themselves to reconnect the supply. The group says it has done hundreds this year. PPC, which has a 90% share of the retail market and 60% of the wholesale market, is supposed to reduce this dominance to less than 50% by 2020 under Greece’s third, 86 billion euro bailout deal.

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It’s time to make this personal. Against Schäuble and Dijsselbloem, Merkel and Rutte and Hollande. They are killing people. There’s nothing innocent about that. Making it personal is the only thing that’ll work. Bring it to their doorstep. Literally to their doorstep.

On Dimitris Christoulas: ‘He Is A Part Of History Now’ (AlJ)

On the morning of April 4, 2012, a gunshot sounded amid the city’s hustle and bustle. As passers-by rushed to work through Syntagma Square in central Athens, Dimitris Christoulas had taken his life with a shotgun a few metres from the Greek parliament. The 77-year-old pensioner, a former pharmacist, had left a note in his pocket. “The occupation government literally annihilated my ability to survive,” he wrote. “I depended on my decent pension, which I alone and without the support of the state, paid for 35 years.” His only daughter, Emmy Christoula, had known nothing about his plans. But, speaking as the fifth anniversary of his death approached, she confidently described her father’s public suicide as a political act. Her father woke up in the morning, got dressed, and wrote two identical notes – putting one in his pocket and leaving the other on his kitchen table for his daughter to read.

He took the subway to the square, site of the country’s most important protests for more than a century. When Dimitris arrived at Syntagma, he texted his daughter – “It’s the end, Emmy,” he wrote – and switched off his phone. Greek morning television talk shows broke the news of Christoulas’s suicide a few minutes after it happened. Hundreds soon gathered to pay their respects. Flowers, letters and notes of resistance were left by the tree where he chose to take his life. Spaniards wrote songs of his resistance. Irish poets wrote odes to him. His funeral turned into a rally against the austerity measures imposed on Greece, when the country’s debt payments became too onerous to pay amid the worldwide recession. The country’s creditors called for harsh spending cuts and steep tax increases so that Athens could make the payments. Protests and riots became a staple of life in Athens in the years that followed.

Five years on from Christoulas’ suicide, the crisis has only grown deeper. Greece’s debt is 175% of its GDP. Greek officials have cut retirees’ pensions 17 times to around half of their value before the recession, according to the Greek Association of Pensioners. Budget cuts have also been implemented in education, health, and welfare services. Lenders must improve most government decisions. Unemployment stands at more than 23%. A fourth bailout agreement is expected soon. According to the Greek Statistical Service, suicides have increased by 68% since 2008, the first year Greek economic growth stagnated. “I’m of a certain age and don’t have the power of dynamically reacting,” wrote Christoulas in his suicide note. “I can’t find another solution to a dignified end, as soon I’d have to start scavenging through the garbage to find my own food.”

Christoulas’ suicide became a symbol of the devastating effects of austerity on the Greek people. Until then, the majority of the stories published in the international media on the issue were about lazy Greeks who deserved their comeuppance for living off debt for so many years. “[My father] taught me that you shouldn’t just follow history, you should write it,” said Emmy, adding that she has accepted her father’s decision but still aches from his absence. Emmy describes her father as a wiry and lean man who had long participated in public life. Her first childhood memories include sitting on his shoulders at pro-democracy rallies against Greece’s military government in the 1970s. The police brutality didn’t deter father and daughter from participating.

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Mar 272017
 


Ray K. Metzker Chicago 1958

 

Sharpest Credit Plunge Since 2008 Could Spell Disaster For US Economy (AEP)
Paper Wealth In US Stocks Reaches $32 Trillion (Fed)
Rich Chinese Race to Apply for a US Golden Visa (BBG)
Russia’s Banking System Has SWIFT Alternative Ready (RT)
Erdogan Setting Back Integration In Germany By Years: Schaeuble (R.)
France’s Le Pen Says The EU ‘Will Die’, Globalists To Be Defeated (R.)
Populism Is The Result Of Global Economic Failure (G.)
The West is Becoming Irrelevant (Vltchek)
The US Will Lose Control Of The Global Internet (Morozov)
Circular Runways Proposed For Airport Efficiency (Curbed)
Trump Presidency “Opens Door” To Planet-Hacking Geoengineer Experiments (G.)
UN’s Famine Appeal Is Billions Shy of Goal (NYT)
‘We Reached Our Limits’: Greece To Stop Taking Back Refugees (RT)
Greek-US Ties Set To Strengthen Significantly (K.)
Greece Considers Capital Control Tightening (K.)

 

 

The Telegraph changed the title of this Ambrose article overnight to “Fading Trump Rally Threatened By Rare Contraction Of US Credit”.

Sharpest Credit Plunge Since 2008 Could Spell Disaster For US Economy (AEP)

Credit strategists are increasingly disturbed by a sudden and rare contraction of US bank lending, fearing a synchronised slowdown in the US and China this year that could catch euphoric markets badly off guard. One key measure of US corporate borrowing is falling at the fastest rate since the onset of the Lehman Brothers crisis. Money supply growth in the US has also slowed markedly. These monetary and credit signals tend to be leading indicators for the real economy. Data from the US Federal Reserve shows that the $2 trillion market for commercial and industrial loans peaked in December. The sector has weakened abruptly as lenders tighten credit, especially for non-residential property. Over the last three months it has dropped at a rate of 5.4pc on annual basis, a pace of decline not seen since December 2008.

The deterioration in the broader $9 trillion market for loans and leases has been less dramatic but it too is shrinking, falling at a 1.6pc rate on a three-month basis. “Corporate lending has ground to a halt and I am staggered that the Fed is raising rates. They have made a very big mistake,” said Patrick Perret-Green from AD Macro. Credit experts at several big US banks have issued warnings over recent days, albeit sotto voce. “We’ve been surprised how little attention the slowdown in US bank lending has garnered,” said Matt King, global credit strategist at Citigroup.

While they are not yet alarmed, their concerns are worth heeding. Credit has tended to pick up signs of trouble several weeks before equity markets in recent episodes of financial stress. “Without another big dose of momentum, the cracks in the global reflationary consensus are liable to grow bigger. All around, existing trends are being called into question,” he said. Net corporate bond issuance has also stalled, indicating that borrowing by US firms as a whole is in decline. “So much for a Trump-driven expansion. Beneath the surface, we think a seismic battle is taking place,” he said.

Elga Bartsch and Chetan Ahya from Morgan Stanley said the credit squeeze is a warning sign and needs watching closely. “On our estimates, the credit impulse turned negative at the end of 2016. We have not seen such a sharp deceleration in bank lending to US corporates since the Great Financial Crisis,” they said. “Historically, credit downturns have led recessions. The plunge could reignite concerns that a highly leveraged US corporate sector may react strongly to even limited interest rates increases,” they said.

[..] Money and credit are certainly not flashing warnings of an imminent crisis, but they are hard to square with the exuberant view of investors that the world is on the cusp of an accelerating economic boom. That boom may already have peaked. The massive stimulus injected by the global authorities last year to counter the Chinese currency scare and any fall-out from Brexit is by now fading, and it is too early to tell whether business will pick up the baton. Any soft patch could all too easily combine with a slowdown in China as the country taps the brakes after an extreme episode of fiscal prime-pumping in 2016. Regulators are clamping down on property speculation and trying to rein in forms of pyramid lending, causing a sharp rise in Shibor lending rates. The worry in China is a maturity mismatch. Huge sums have been borrowed on the short-term markets. These debts have to be rolled over constantly to cover long-term liabilities. It was this sort of mismatch that brought down Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers.

[..] Weak US indicators are clearly at odds with the Trump rally on Wall Street, which has pushed equity valuations to nose-bleed levels. Kevin Gaynor from Nomura says his model of asset pricing suggests markets are in effect assuming global growth of 5pc and earnings increases of 30pc a year. These are heroic. “There is a time decay on this new temporary equilibrium,” he notes acidly. What is so disturbing is that each extra dollar of new debt now generates just $0.17 of extra GDP in the US, down from around $0.75 in the 1960s. Much of the corporate debt built up in this cycle has been to buy back stock or pay dividends.

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“Half could be erased and still exceed historical valuation norms.” Fall 50% and still be overvalued. But not a bubble?!

Paper Wealth In US Stocks Reaches $32 Trillion (Fed)

John Hussman comments: “Paper wealth in U.S. stocks reaches $32 trillion. Half could be erased and still exceed historical valuation norms.”

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They can take out $50,000 per year but need ten times that for a golden visa.

Rich Chinese Race to Apply for a US Golden Visa (BBG)

As members of Congress in Washington debate raising the minimum required to obtain a U.S. immigrant investor visa from $500,000 to $1.35 million, concern about the hike has set off a scramble among wealthy would-be participants in China. “Some clients are demanding that we make sure their applications are submitted before April 28,” the date the program expires unless extended or amended by Congress, said Judy Gao, director of the U.S. program at Can-Reach (Pacific), a Beijing-based agency that facilitates so-called EB-5 Immigrant Investor visas. “We’re working overtime to do that.” China’s wealthy, using not-always-legal means to skirt capital controls to get their money out and at the same time gain residency in the U.S., are continuing to dwarf all others as the largest participants in the EB-5 program, despite heightened measures by the Chinese government.

[..] Because Chinese individuals are limited to exchanging $50,000 worth of yuan a year, a 10th of what the EB-5 program requires, some agents are advising clients who don’t already have assets offshore to use a means nicknamed “smurfing” to move their money. “Our suggestion to the client is to open three to four personal accounts in the U.S. or line up three to four friends’ accounts, so they can split the money and wire it to different personal accounts without being put on a blacklist by the Chinese authorities,” said a Shanghai-based real estate agent who gave the surname Dong. “It may require a trip to the States to do so to facilitate the process.” [..] While the government in Beijing spent much of 2016 working to stop its citizens sending money abroad in order to stabilize its declining currency and foreign reserves, Chinese investors’ use of EB-5 continued anyway, totaling $3.8 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

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The sanctions and hysteria allow and force Russia to break the chains and be creative.

Russia’s Banking System Has SWIFT Alternative Ready (RT)

If the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is shut down in Russia, the country’s banking system will not crash, according to Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina. Russia has a substitute. “There were threats that we can be disconnected from SWIFT. We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative,” Nabiullina said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. She also added that 90% of ATMs in Russia are ready to accept the Mir payment system, a domestic version of Visa and MasterCard. Izvestia daily reported that as of January 2016, 330 Russian banks had been connected to the SWIFT alternative, the system for transfer of financial messages (SPFS).

In 2014 and 2015, when the crisis in relations between Russia and the West were at their peak over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, some Western politicians urged disconnecting Russia from SWIFT. In November 2015, Nabiullina said the SPFS was close to being completed. The central bank’s website says the system was established “as an alternative channel for interbank cooperation with the aim of ensuring the guaranteed and uninterrupted provision of services for the transmission of electronic messages on financial transactions.” At present, the system has some drawbacks. It doesn’t work from 9pm to 5am Moscow time and costs up to five cents per wire transfer, which is regarded expensive.

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Schäuble is not all stupidity.

Erdogan Setting Back Integration In Germany By Years: Schaeuble (R.)

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who accuses Chancellor Angela Merkel of using “Nazi methods” against Turks in Germany, is setting back their integration by years, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has said. Berlin is growing increasingly frustrated about Erdogan repeatedly accusing it of applying “Nazi methods” by banning rallies aimed at drumming up support among Turks in Germany for a referendum that would strengthen the power of his presidency. Turks workers began moving to Germany in the 1960s and the country now has about 3 million people of Turkish background. Some are fully integrated while others live in ethnic communities with less contact with the majority population.

“Erdogan’s rhetoric makes me stunned,” Schaeuble, a veteran member of Merkel’s Christian Democratic (CDU) party, told the Welt am Sonntag weekly newspaper. “In a short time, it wilfully destroys the integration that has grown over years in Germany. The repair of the damage will take years,” he said. Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul on Sunday: “You call the president of the Turkish Republic a dictator. When we call them fascists, they get annoyed. When we call them Nazis, they get annoyed.” “You are fascists, you are. Be annoyed as much as you want with Nazi practices. If you draw swastikas on the walls of our mosques and don’t hold anyone accountable, you cannot take off this stain,” Erdogan said.

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According to Le Monde, one third of French (43% under 35) doesn’t know if they’re going to vote at all. And half still don’t know who to vote for. Beware the polls.

France’s Le Pen Says The EU ‘Will Die’, Globalists To Be Defeated (R.)

The European Union will disappear, French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen told a rally on Sunday, aiming to re-enthuse core supporters in the final four weeks before voting gets underway. Buoyed by the unexpected election of Donald Trump in the United States and by Britain’s vote to leave the EU, the leader of the anti-EU and anti-immigrant National Front (FN) party, told the rally in Lille that the French election would be the next step in what she called a global rebellion of the people. “The European Union will die because the people do not want it anymore,” Le Pen said to loud cheers and applause. “The time has come to defeat globalists,” she said, adding: “My message is one of emancipation, of liberation … a call for all the patriots to gather behind our flag.”

Opinion polls forecast that Le Pen will do well in the April 23 first round of the presidential election only to lose the May 7 run-off to centrist Emmanuel Macron. Its anti-EU, anti-euro stance is one of the FN’s standard-bearing policies, both a mark of its anti-establishment stance that pleases grass-roots supporters and attracts voters angry with globalization, and a likely obstacle to its quest for power in a country where a majority oppose a return to the franc. Le Pen has over the past few months tried to accommodate this opposition to leaving the euro by continuing to criticize the unpopular EU while telling voters she would not abruptly pull France out of the bloc or the euro but instead hold a referendum after six months of renegotiating the terms of France’s EU membership.

On Sunday she told the rally she would seek to replace the EU by “another Europe,” which she called “the Europe of the people,” based on a loose cooperative of nations. “It must be done in a rational, well-prepared way,” she told Le Parisien in an interview published earlier on Sunday. “I don’t want chaos. Within the negotiation calendar I want to carry out … the euro would be the last step because I want to wait for the outcome of elections in Germany in the fall before renegotiating it.”

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But is the economic failure caused only by wrong policies?

Populism Is The Result Of Global Economic Failure (G.)

The rise of populism has rattled the global political establishment. Brexit came as a shock, as did the victory of Donald Trump. Much head-scratching has resulted as leaders seek to work out why large chunks of their electorates are so cross. The answer seems pretty simple. Populism is the result of economic failure. The 10 years since the financial crisis have shown that the system of economic governance which has held sway for the past four decades is broken. Some call this approach neoliberalism. Perhaps a better description would be unpopulism. Unpopulism meant tilting the balance of power in the workplace in favour of management and treating people like wage slaves. Unpopulism was rigged to ensure that the fruits of growth went to the few not to the many.

Unpopulism decreed that those responsible for the global financial crisis got away with it while those who were innocent bore the brunt of austerity. Anybody seeking to understand why Trump won the US presidential election should take a look at what has been happening to the division of the economic spoils. The share of national income that went to the bottom 90% of the population held steady at around 66% from 1950 to 1980. It then began a steep decline, falling to just over 50% when the financial crisis broke in 2007. Similarly, it is no longer the case that everybody benefits when the US economy is doing well. During the business cycle upswing between 1961 and 1969, the bottom 90% of Americans took 67% of the income gains. During the Reagan expansion two decades later they took 20%.

During the Greenspan housing bubble of 2001 to 2007, they got just two cents in every extra dollar of national income generated while the richest 10% took the rest. The US economist Thomas Palley* says that up until the late 1970s countries operated a virtuous circle growth model in which wages were the engine of demand growth. “Productivity growth drove wage growth which fueled demand growth. That promoted full employment, which provided the incentive to invest, which drove further productivity growth,” he says.

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China doesn’t want war. Neither does Russia.

The West is Becoming Irrelevant (Vltchek)

China, one of the oldest and greatest civilizations on Earth, went through the terrible period of ‘humiliation’. Divided, occupied and plundered by the West, it has never forgotten nor forgiven. Now the Chinese Communist state and its mixed economy are helping countries in virtually all parts of the world, from Oceania and Latin America, to the Middle East and especially Africa, to survive and to finally stand on their own feet. Despite all the vitriolic propaganda regurgitated by the West (those people in Europe or North America who know close to zero about Africa or China,habitually passing ‘confident’ and highly cynical ‘judgments’ about China’s involvement in the poor world; judgments based exclusively on the lies and fabrications produced by the Western media), China has been gaining great respect and trust in virtually all corners of the globe.

The Chinese people and their government are now standing firmly against Western imperialism. They will not allow any recurrence of the disgraceful and dreary past. The West is provoking this mighty and optimistic nation, pushing it into a terrible confrontation. China doesn’t want any military conflict. It is the most peaceful, the most non-confrontational large nation on Earth. But it is becoming clear that if pushed against the wall, this time it will not compromise: it will fight. In the last years I have spoken to many Chinese people, as I traveled to all corners of the country, and I’m convinced that by now the nation is ready to meet strength with strength. Such determination gives hope to many other countries on our Planet. The message is clear: the West cannot do whatever it wants, anymore. If it tries, it will be stopped. By reason or by force!

Russia is ready again, too. It is standing next to China, enormous and indignant. Go to Novosibirsk or Tomsk, to Khabarovsk, Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk in Kamchatka. Talk to Russian people and you will soon understand: almost nobody there believes or respects the West, anymore. Throughout history, Russia was attacked and ransacked from the West. Millions, tens of millions of its people were murdered, literally exterminated. And now, the nation is facing what some consider to be yet another imminent attack. Like the Chinese people, Russians are unwilling to compromise, anymore. The old Russian forecast is once again alive, that very one professed by Alexander Nevsky: Go tell all in foreign lands that Russia lives! Those who come to us in peace will be welcome as a guest. But those who come to us sword in hand will die by the sword! On that Russia stands and forever will we stand!

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By dismantling domestic privacy laws, ….

The US Will Lose Control Of The Global Internet (Morozov)

The numerous paradoxes that will haunt Donald Trump in the coming months were on full display during the recent Senate vote to undo privacy legislation that was passed in the last few years of the Obama administration. As part of a broader effort to treat internet service providers and telecoms operators as utility companies, Obama imposed restrictions on what these companies could do with all the user data from browsers and apps. Emboldened by Trump, the Republicans have just allowed these businesses to collect, sell and manipulate such data without user permission. From the short-sighted domestic perspective, it seems like a boon to the likes of Verizon and AT&T, especially as they increasingly find themselves confronting their data-rich counterparts in Silicon Valley.

Telecoms companies have been complaining (not entirely without reason) that the Obama administration favoured the interests of Google and Facebook which, invoking the lofty rhetoric of “keeping the internet free” only to defend their own business agenda, have traditionally faced somewhat lighter regulation. The Democrats, always happy to attack Trump, have jumped on the issue, warning that the Senate vote would foster ubiquitous and extensive surveillance by the telecoms industry – and Silicon Valley, of course, would never commit such sins. Under the new rules, complained Bill Nelson, a senator from Florida, “your broadband provider may know more about your health – and your reaction to illness – than you are willing to share with your doctor”.

Never mind that Google and Facebook already know all this – and much more – and generate little outrage from the Democrats. The Democrats, of course, only have themselves to blame for such ineptitude. From the early 1980s onwards, centre-left movements on both sides of the Atlantic no longer discussed technology policy in terms of justice, fairness or inequality. Instead, they preferred to emulate their neoliberal opponents and frame choices – about technology policy, but also about many other domains – in terms of just one goal that rules supreme above all other: innovation. The problem with building a political programme on such flimsy economistic foundations is that it immediately opens the door to competing narratives of just what kind of policy produces more innovation.

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I watch the increase in global aviation with a very heavy heart. But this is smart.

Circular Runways Proposed For Airport Efficiency (Curbed)

While airport terminal architecture has a solid history of style and innovation, rarely is a proposal put forth to utterly redesign the runway. But that’s precisely the aim of Henk Hesselink, a Dutch scientist working with the Netherlands Aerospace Centre. Dubbed the “endless runway”, Hesselink’s brainchild is a 360-degree landing strip measuring more than two miles in diameter. Since airplanes would be able to approach and take off from any direction around the proposed circle, they wouldn’t have to fight against crosswinds.

And three planes would be able to take off or land at the same time. Hesselink’s team uses flight simulators and computerized calculations to test the unconventional design, and have determined that round airports would be more efficient than existing layouts. With a central terminal, the airport would only use about a third of the land of the typical airport with the same airplane capacity. And there’s an added benefit to those living near airports: Flight paths could be more distributed, and thereby making plane noise more tolerable. So far, there have been no plans to actually build a circular runway, but Hesselink’s research continues on.

 

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The Better Than God crowd is not done with you just yet.

Trump Presidency “Opens Door” To Planet-Hacking Geoengineer Experiments (G.)

Harvard engineers who launched the world’s biggest solar geoengineering research program may get a dangerous boost from Donald Trump, environmental organizations are warning. Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth. Sometime in 2018, Harvard engineers David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to test spraying from a high-altitude balloon over Arizona, in order to assess the risks and benefits of deployment on a larger scale. Keith cancelled a similar planned experiment in New Mexico in 2012, but announced he was ready for field testing at a geoengineering forum in Washington on Friday.

“The context for discussing solar geoengineering research has changed substantially since we planned and funded this forum nearly one year ago,” a forum briefing paper noted. While geoengineering received little favour under Obama, high-level officials within the Trump administration have been long-time advocates for planetary-scale manipulation of Earth systems. David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering. He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature.

“Clearly parts of the Trump administration are very willing to open the door to reckless schemes like David Keith’s, and may well have quietly given the nod to open-air experiments,” said Silvia Riberio, with technology watchdog ETC Group. “Worryingly, geoengineering may emerge as this administration’s preferred approach to global warming. In their view, building a big beautiful wall of sulphate in the sky could be a perfect excuse to allow uncontrolled fossil fuel extraction. We need to be focussing on radical emissions cuts, not dangerous and unjust technofixes.” [.] “Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year,” he said in 2008, before helping launch a geoengineering unit while he ran the right-wing think tank American Economic Enterprise. “We would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific innovation. Bring on American ingenuity. Stop the green pig.”

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We need to do Bob Geldof all over again? We are a disgrace.

UN’s Famine Appeal Is Billions Shy of Goal (NYT)

A month ago, the secretary general of the United Nations, António Guterres, warned that 20 million people would fall into famine if his aid agencies could not corral $4.4 billion by the end of March. It is almost the end of March, and so far, the United Nations has received less than a tenth of the money – $423 million, according to its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The funding appeal, and the paltry response, comes as the Trump administration is poised to make sharp cuts to its foreign aid budget, including for the United Nations. Historically, the United States has been the agency’s largest single donor for humanitarian aid. For all four countries at risk — Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen – the United States has given $277 million so far this year, not all of it for famine relief.

The conditions for famine are specific and not easy to meet, which is why the last time a famine was declared was in Somalia in July 2011, after 260,000 had died of hunger and related complications. The three criteria for declaring a famine are when one in five households in a certain area face extreme food shortages; more than 30% of the population is acutely malnourished; and at least two people for every 10,000 die each day. A famine has already been declared in a swath of South Sudan. A similar risk looms over Somalia, still reeling from years of conflict, and Yemen, where Houthi insurgents are battling a Saudi-led coalition supported by the United States and Britain. In northern Nigeria, a famine could already be underway, according to an early warning system funded by the United States Agency for International Development.

But the security situation is so bad there that aid workers have been unable to assess levels of hunger. On Thursday, Somalia’s newly elected president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, told the Security Council by videolink from Mogadishu that half the population faces acute food shortages. The United Nations says it needs the $4.4 billion to deliver food, clean water and basic medicine like oral rehydration salts to avert diarrhea deaths among children. Only 8% of the money the agency needs for Yemen has been funded; for Nigeria, 9%; for South Sudan, 18%; and for Somalia, 32%. Of the 20 million who are at risk of famine are 1.4 million children, who are most vulnerable. To put the $4.4 billion appeal in perspective, Britain has made slightly less, $4.1 billion, from weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in the two years since the war began in Yemen.

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The most insane idea to come out of the EU yet. And there’s a lot of competition for that.

‘We Reached Our Limits’: Greece To Stop Taking Back Refugees (RT)

Greece will cease taking back refugees under the controversial Dublin Regulation, as the country’s limited capacities to host people are already on the brink of collapse, the Greek migration minister announced in an interview. As the European Commission pressures Athens to re-implement the Dublin Regulation – stipulating that refugees can be returned to the first EU state they arrived in – the Greek migration minister told Spiegel his country is not in a position to do so. The agreement was put on hold for Greece back in 2011 over problems in the country’s asylum system. “Greece is already shouldering a heavy burden,” Ioannis Mouzalas, the migration minister, said. “We accommodate 60,000 refugees… and it would be a mistake to make Greece’s burden heavier by the revival of the Dublin agreement,” he said, also adding that Germany, the primary destination for most refugees, “wants countries where refugees arrive first to bear a large portion of the burden.”

Under the Dublin Regulation, the European state where the asylum-seeker first arrives in the EU is responsible for examining an asylum claim. Refugees are fingerprinted in their first country of arrival to ensure irrefutable evidence of their entry. However, rights groups warn that imminent transfers from other EU countries back to Greece in line with the regulations are likely to cause more refugees than ever to go underground in western European countries, as many are desperate to stay there because of family links or successful attempts to start a new life. The scheme also adds even greater pressure to existing refugee facilities in Greece and beyond. Asked if Athens is ruling out implementation of the Dublin Regulation, Mouzalas answered in the affirmative, adding, “I want the Germans to understand that this is not because of political or ideological reasons, or failure to appreciate Germany’s assistance.” “Greece simply has no capacities to cope with additional arrival of refugees,” he said.

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Erdogan will not like this. And the US must realize that the EU squeezing Greece bone dry does not help such proposals. For good cooperation, you need strong and stable partners.

Greek-US Ties Set To Strengthen Significantly (K.)

Greece is examining US proposals for military cooperation which would widen ties to an extent not seen in the last three decades, Kathimerini understands. According to sources, Washington’s desire for stronger ties stems from its view that Greece has a significant geopolitical role to play as a pillar of stability in a volatile region. More specifically, Washington has proposed the participation of a Greek military vessel in a carrier battle group (CVBG), which consists of an aircraft carrier and a large number of escort vessels. According to the US proposals, the participation of a Greek vessel in the CVBG will be accompanied by the renewal of the Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) between the two countries.

The MDCA is of utmost significance as it is through this pact that American military forces are permitted to use the Souda naval base on Crete. During a meeting last week US Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Defense Minister Panos Kammenos discussed the option of renewing the agreement for five to 10 years instead of each year, as has been the case to date. The Americans reportedly want to renew the deal every five years, as they want to expand the scope of their activities at the base. Sources have told Kathimerini that the only possible obstacle to the deal’s renewal on a five-year basis is that it must receive approval in Parliament, and the leftist-led coalition fears the possibility of dissent emanating from lawmakers of ruling SYRIZA.

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And why not: recovery is not possible anyway.

Greece Considers Capital Control Tightening (K.)

The capital controls were originally supposed to be a one-off measure that would be removed in a matter of months, with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras stating in September 2015 that they would be lifted in early 2017. Today, 21 months since they were imposed, the capital controls are still here, and with the drop in bank deposits, it appears more likely they will be tightened than relaxed or lifted. The truth is that a full Greek recovery will not be possible as long as the capital controls remain, but the economy remains mired in uncertainty and the banks have not seen their CCC+ credit rating improve.

Bank officials note it will be a long time before the restrictions are removed, and this will require the consolidation of a basic sense of confidence among citizens that the worst is over. This is particularly difficult today given that few bailout reviews have been completed according to schedule in the last seven years – and the ongoing second review of the third bailout program was supposed to have finished 13 months ago, in February 2016. Banks therefore fear that if deposit outflow continues as it has done in the first quarter of the year, further controls are quite likely.

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Mar 112017
 
 March 11, 2017  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Robert Capa Warsaw, Poland 1948

 

US Jobs Report Means Fed Rate Hike Is A Bolt-On Certainty (G.)
US Household Wealth Has Never Been Higher Relative To Income (ZH)
Rising Household Debt A Concern Across Asia (TEP)
Sessions Asks 46 Obama-Era US Attorneys To Resign (R.)
Trump’s Revised Travel Ban Dealt First Court Setback (R.)
Trump To Ask Merkel For Advice On Putin, Ukraine (R.)
Nobel Economist Deaton Takes Aim At Rent-Seeking US Economy (MW)
US Regulators Reject Bitcoin ETF, Digital Currency Plunges (R.)
The Bag Holder and His Bag (Jim Kunstler)
New Island To Be Built In North Sea Under ‘Science-Fiction-Like’ Plan (Ind.)
General Flynn and the Strategic Deficit (K.)
Turkey Loses Momentum In Northern Syria As US Supports Kurds (ARA)
UN Accuses Turkey Of Abuses Against Kurds In Country’s Southeast (AlJ)
Greek Court To Rule On Turkey’s ‘Safe Country’ Status (K.)
Lagarde Insists On Greek Debt Restructuring (K.)
Roman Citizens Are Breaking The Law To Feed And Help Refugees (R.)
World Faces Worst Humanitarian Crisis Since 1945 – UN (G.)

 

 

Don’t be surprised if Yellen gets cold feet.

US Jobs Report Means Fed Rate Hike Is A Bolt-On Certainty (G.)

The latest US jobs report removes any lingering doubts about whether the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates next week. Following news that the world’s biggest economy generated 235,000 net new non-farm jobs in February, it is a bolt-on certainty that the central bank will push up the cost of borrowing by a quarter of a point. It is now almost 10 years since the start of the financial crisis ushered in a period of ultra-low interest rates and it has been clear for a while that the Fed is anxious to speed up the normalisation process. A healthy labour market is the key to that process and it would have taken a shockingly bad report to stay the bank’s hand. This was not it. Indeed, the financial markets have already moved on from next week to musing about how many more times the Fed will tighten during the course of 2017. The feeling is that two more rate rises are in prospect.

It certainly seems unlikely that next Wednesday’s rise will be the end of the matter. The report from the Bureau of Labour Statistics showed employment up by more than the 190,000 expected by Wall Street and unemployment at 4.7%. Annual wage growth is running at 2.8%. Policymakers at the Fed will look at this data and conclude that inflationary pressures are building as the economy approaches full employment. With US productivity so weak, the central bank will certainly be tempted to move again if and when earnings growth hits 3%. There was plenty for Donald Trump to welcome. A mild winter has resulted in a big increase in construction jobs. Manufacturing employment was also up. The only weak spot was retailing. The new president has plans for a big package of tax cuts and spending increases but fiscal easing will mean more aggressive tightening from the Fed, which is already starting to fret about the risks of the economy overheating.

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Print and borrow. Rinse and repeat.

US Household Wealth Has Never Been Higher Relative To Income (ZH)

For 45 years – until Alan Greenspan in 1994 – the average wealth-to-income of American households had held steady around 4.9x – but as of Q4 2016, for the first time in US history, household wealth has reached a point where it is 6.5 times large than inflation-adjusted household disposable income in America. As Bloomberg reports, the surge – driven by higher stock prices and property values, according to The Fed – pushed this measure of relative exuberance (think of it as the country’s price-to-earnings ratio) above the housing boom peak of mid-2000s and well above the dot-com bubble driven highs of the last 1990s. As Alliance Bernstein economist Joe Carson wrote in a note: “Economic and financial history do not always repeat, but sometimes they do.” So the question is – what happens next?

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Debt and wealth feel eerily similar.

Rising Household Debt A Concern Across Asia (TEP)

Government officials, policymakers, economists, bankers and experts gathered here for the Second Annual Asean Consumer and Household Debt Conference on Feb 22 and 23. The two-day event aimed to provide insight into the implications of household debt and the challenges faced by the policymakers. “Over the years, household financial liabilities as a share of personal disposable income has gone up in Asia,” said Akrur Barua, an economist at Deloitte Services LP, setting the tone for the conference. According to Barua, a number of factors have led to the rise in household debt in Asia. Rising incomes in Asia have resulted in higher consumer demand for products and services. Along with income growth, there is an increase in access to credit across Asian economies.

Post- 2008, policymakers also offered fiscal and monetary incentives to entice consumers to spend more. In addition, rising demand and a flow of liquidity led to a surge in asset prices, especially in the housing sector. With demand for housing remaining strong and house prices rising, the result has been a rapid increase in the value of housing loans or mortgages. “Cyclical credit outpaced cyclical growth from 2011 to 2015 in many Southeast Asian countries”, noted Vincent Conti, Asia-Pacific economist at Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services Singapore. According to Barua, the household debt burden in many Asian economies is now even higher than the US figure prior to 2009, before the global financial crisis (see Chart 1). In fact, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan have crossed the 80% mark in household debt-to-GDP ratio.

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David Stockman on Twitter: “46 Obama US Attorneys must go ASAP. That means you, Preet Bharara. Enough self-righteous bullies with badges! “

Sessions Asks 46 Obama-Era US Attorneys To Resign (R.)

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions abruptly asked the remaining 46 chief federal prosecutors left over from the Obama administration to resign on Friday, including Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who had been asked to stay on in November by then President-elect Donald Trump. Although U.S. attorneys are political appointees, and the request from Trump’s Justice Department is part of a routine process, the move came as a surprise. Not every new administration replaces all U.S. attorneys at once. A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed the resignation requests included Bharara, whose office handles some of the most critical business and criminal cases passing through the federal judicial system.

Bharara met with Trump in Trump Tower on Nov. 30. After, Bharara told reporters the two had a “good meeting” and he had agreed to stay on. On Friday, Bharara was unsure where he stood because he did not know if the person who contacted him about resigning was aware that Trump had asked him to remain in office, according to a source familiar with the matter. It was not immediately clear if all resignations would ultimately be accepted. A Justice Department spokesman said on Friday Trump had called Dana Boente, acting U.S. deputy attorney general, to decline his resignation. Trump also called Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, his pick to take over as deputy attorney general, to keep him in his post, the spokesman said.

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Broader views are needed.

Trump’s Revised Travel Ban Dealt First Court Setback (R.)

A federal judge in Wisconsin dealt the first legal blow to President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban on Friday, barring enforcement of the policy to deny U.S. entry to the wife and child of a Syrian refugee already granted asylum in the United States. The temporary restraining order, granted by U.S. District Judge William Conley in Madison, applies only to the family of the Syrian refugee, who brought the case anonymously to protect the identities of his wife and daughter, still living in the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo. But it represents the first of several challenges brought against Trump’s newly amended executive order, issued on March 6 and due to go into effect on March 16, to draw a court ruling in opposition to its enforcement.

Conley, chief judge of the federal court in Wisconsin’s western district and an appointee of former President Barack Obama, concluded the plaintiff “has presented some likelihood of success on the merits” of his case and that his family faces “significant risk of irreparable harm” if forced to remain in Syria. The plaintiff, a Sunni Muslim, fled Syria to the United States in 2014 to “escape near-certain death” at the hands of sectarian military forces fighting the Syrian government in Aleppo, according to his lawsuit. He subsequently obtained asylum for his wife and their only surviving child, a daughter, and their application had cleared the security vetting process and was headed for final processing when it was halted by Trump’s original travel ban on Jan. 27.

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Those are Merkel’s blind spots. And Greece.

Trump To Ask Merkel For Advice On Putin, Ukraine (R.)

President Donald Trump will ask Chancellor Angela Merkel for advice on how to deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. officials said on Friday, as the U.S. and German leaders meet next week after sometimes pointed disagreements in recent months. Merkel will visit the White House on Tuesday for talks with Trump and a joint news conference in what will be their first face-to-face meeting since the new U.S. president took power on Jan. 20. They are expected to discuss Germany’s level of defense spending for the NATO alliance, the Ukraine conflict, Syrian refugees, the EU and a host of other issues, said three senior Trump administration officials who briefed reporters.

During the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, Trump regularly criticized Merkel for her open-door refugee policy, contrasting it with what he promised would be tighter controls in the United States if he won office. Merkel has been a leading critic of Trump’s effort to ban travelers temporarily from seven Muslim-majority nations, a list that has since been pared back to six. “My expectation is that they’ll have a very positive, cordial meeting,” said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Trump has long expressed desire for warmer U.S. relations with Russia but some of his top Cabinet officials are skeptical. “The president will be very interested in hearing the chancellor’s views on her experience interacting with Putin,” said another official. “He’s going to be very interested in hearing her insights on what it’s like to deal with the Russians.”

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Deaton is no fool.

Nobel Economist Takes Aim At Rent-Seeking Banking, Healthcare Industries (MW)

Income inequality is not killing capitalism in the United States, but rent-seekers like the banking and the health-care sectors just might, said Nobel-winning economist Angus Deaton on Monday. If an entrepreneur invents something on the order of another Facebook, Deaton said he has no problem with that person becoming wealthy. “What is not OK is for rent-seekers to get rich,” Deaton said in a luncheon speech to the National Association for Business Economics. Rent seekers lobby and persuade governments to give them special favors. Bankers during the financial crisis, and much of the health-care system, are two prime examples, Deaton said. Rent-seeking is not only does not generate new product, it actually slows down economic growth, Deaton said.

“All that talent is devoted to stealing things, instead of making things,” he said. Another prime example of rent-seeking is that the Medicaid is funding opioid prescriptions for low-income workers, Deaton said. The results are workers who are becoming addicted and overdosing while profits are going to the Sacker family which owns Purdue Pharma that makes OxyContin. Deaton said he favors a single-payer health system only because our current part-private and part-public system is exquisitely designed to give opportunities for rent-seeking. “So I, who do not believe in socialized health-care, would advocate a single-payment system…because it will get this monster that we’ve created out of the economy and allow the rest of capitalism to flourish without the awful things that healthcare is doing to us,” he said.

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But door is left open.

US Regulators Reject Bitcoin ETF, Digital Currency Plunges (R.)

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday denied a request to list what would have been the first U.S. exchange-traded fund built to track bitcoin, the digital currency. Investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss have been trying for more than three years to convince the SEC to let it bring the Bitcoin ETF to market. CBOE Holdings’ Bats exchange had applied to list the ETF. The digital currency’s price plunged, falling as much as 18% in trading immediately after the decision before rebounding slightly. It last traded down 7.8% to $1,098. Bitcoin had scaled to a record of nearly $1,300 this month, higher than the price of an ounce of gold, as investors speculated that an ETF holding the digital currency could woo more people into buying the asset.

[..] “Based on the record before it, the Commission believes that the significant markets for bitcoin are unregulated,” the SEC said in a statement. “The commission notes that bitcoin is still in the relatively early stages of its development and that, over time, regulated bitcoin-related markets of significant size may develop.” The regulators have questions and concerns about how the funds would work and whether they could be priced and trade effectively, according to a financial industry source familiar with the SEC’s thinking. [..] Advocates of the currency and the technology it relies on to document transactions, blockchain, were dismayed by the ruling. “How do we develop well-capitalized and regulated markets in the U.S. and Europe if financial innovators aren’t allowed to bring products to market that grow domestic demand for digital currencies like bitcoin?” asked Jerry Brito, executive director of Coin Center, an advocacy group.

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“RussiaGate — come on, let’s finally call it that —”

The Bag Holder and His Bag (Jim Kunstler)

[..] getting rid of Trump would only leave the Deep State with a bigger problem: itself. That is, an economy and a society that can’t be governed by any means. I think many professional observers-of-the-scene are missing something in this unspooling story: the Deep State is actually becoming more impotent and ineffectual, not omnipotent. Case in point: RussiaGate — come on, let’s finally call it that — the popular idea that Russia hacked the 2016 presidential election. It’s popular because it’s such a convenient excuse for the failure of a corrupt, exhausted, and brain-dead Democratic establishment. But all the exertions of the Deep State to put over this story since last summer were negated this week by two events.

First, there was former NSA Director James Clapper’s appearance on NBC’s Sunday Meet the Press show with Chuck Todd featuring the following interchange: CHUCK TODD: Does intelligence exist that can definitively answer the following question, whether there were improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials? JAMES CLAPPER: We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say, “our,” that’s N.S.A., F.B.I. and C.I.A., with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had anything, that had any reflection of collusion between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. There was no evidence of that included in our report. CHUCK TODD: I understand that. But does it exist? JAMES CLAPPER: Not to my knowledge. And so what to make of the RussiaGate histrionics served up by CNN, The New York Times, the WashPo, NPR, and sundry tools as Senator Chuck Schumer (D–NY)?

What I make of it is a growing civil war in the government itself, and perhaps something arguably like sedition. Second matter: this week’s release of Wikileaks’ Vault-7 trove of purloined government documents. These seem to suggest that US Intel agencies have acquired the ability to spoof any activity on any sort of computer or program that makes it impossible to track the identity of any hacker and, what’s more, gives US Intel a tool to make any party appear culpable for any given case of hacking — meaning that if so called computer hacking “footprints” had been discovered linking Russia to the Hillary-DNC-Podesta emails, those footprints could have been engineered by US Intel itself… meaning further that any so-called “evidence” of Russian election hacking could not be proven one way or the other.

Now, this might be too fine a point for the RussiaGate partisans, but I don’t see how it fails to moot the issue. The partisans are still finding other ways to propagandize. On Thursday evening, NPR ran a story about Russia breaking a missile agreement with this wrap-up from correspondent David Welna: WELNA: Still unclear is how President Trump, an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin, might respond to Moscow’s defiance. David Welna, NPR News, Washington. That lapse of newsmanship is the kind of thing that makes me (a still-registered Democrat) want to support the defunding of NPR.

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Far too many people still claim we can replace our current energy consumption with renewables. That idea will have to die first.

New Island To Be Built In North Sea Under ‘Science-Fiction-Like’ Plan (Ind.)

A vast artificial island is to be built at Dogger Bank in the North Sea, complete with a harbour, airstrip and homes, to help provide a vast new supply of renewable energy, under plans drawn up by two companies with the blessing of the European Union. The North Sea Wind Power Hub would act as a hub for offshore wind turbines and a new place to put solar panels, according to the German and Dutch arms of electricity firm TenneT and Danish company Energinet. The firms will sign a deal creating a consortium to develop the plan further in Brussels on 23 March in the presence of European Energy Union Commissioner, Maos Sefcovic. Torben Glar Nielsen, Energinet’s Danish technical director, said: “Maybe it sounds a bit crazy and science fiction-like, but an island on Dogger Bank could make the wind power of the future a lot cheaper and more effective.”

It is thought the island – or possibly islands – could act as a hub for thousands of new wind turbines, which would eventually generate green electricity for more than 80 million people. Under the proposals, the island would be connected by electricity cables to the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Belgium. Mel Kroon, TenneT’s chief executive, said: “This project can significantly contribute to a completely renewable supply of electricity in north-west Europe. “TenneT and Energinet.dk both have extensive experience in the fields of onshore grids, the connection of offshore wind energy and cross-border connections.

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Flynn’s escapades as a foreign agent for Turkey are making Greeks very nervous.

General Flynn and the Strategic Deficit (K.)

It is as if a torpedo passed under our keel and we saw it only when it exploded elsewhere. The recent revelations from President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, retired General Michael Flynn, showed that we had a close call. A lawyer for Flynn filed paperwork with the Justice Department declaring that last year he undertook lobbying work that “could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey.” For the work between August and November, Flynn Intel Group Inc was paid 530,000 dollars. Flynn was forced to resign from the position of Trump’s top security aide in February when it emerged that although he had met with the Russian ambassador to the United States he had lied to Vice President Mike Pence about this, after which the latter repeated Flynn’s lies in public.

The extent of Flynn’s dealings with Russia and Turkey is not known, but it is clear that if he had not resigned he would have remained, at least, a former strong supporter of Turkey. On November 8, Flynn had published an opinion piece in The Hill, a Washington-based political newspaper, titled “Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support.” Flynn argued that the United States should extradite the self-exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claims was behind the failed coup in Turkey last July. “We should not provide him safe haven,” Flynn wrote of Gulen. “In this crisis, it is imperative that we remember who our real friends are.”

On Wednesday, The Hill’s editor added a note to the piece, clarifying that the newspaper did not know that Flynn had been paid to write it, nor that the draft had been shown earlier to a Dutch company, Inovo BV, which, the note said, is “owned by a Turkish businessman with ties to Turkey’s president.” The Associated Press reported that according to the documents filed, Flynn, who was then a top aide to presidential candidate Trump, met in September with the Turkish ministers of foreign affairs and energy.

The cooperation ended in November, and though it is difficult to believe that Flynn was paid half a million dollars for one op-ed piece, we cannot claim that as national security adviser he would have made Turkish interests his priority. At the same time, can we really have expected him to have been completely unbiased in any Greek-Turkish dispute? We still don’t know the interests of people around the American president – who himself has business interests in Turkey, among other countries. Nothing is as it was. Prior US strategy cannot be taken for granted. This makes it imperative for our country to be clear about its own course, to implement its strategy calmly and decisively. We must avoid being caught up in the game of our excitable neighbors and keep our eyes on where we want to go.

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Things are only getting more confusing.

Turkey Loses Momentum In Northern Syria As US Supports Kurds (ARA)

Turkey has lost momentum in the war for northern Syria as the United States draws on Kurdish allies in the assault on ISIS-held Raqqa, but Ankara is still pressing Washington for a deal that allays its fears of Kurdish ascendancy. Syrian Kurdish groups meanwhile sense Washington is now more firmly behind them than before, a shift they hope will eventually aid their ambitions for autonomy after years of persecution by the Syrian government. One of the most complicated theatres in the multi-sided Syrian conflict, the war in the north has played out at lightning pace in the last few weeks with ISIS fighters either withdrawing or collapsing in swathes of territory. The Russian-backed Syrian army has benefited from this, creating a corridor to the Euphrates River that secures Aleppo’s water supplies and suggests at least tacit coordination with US-allied Kurdish militia – at Turkey’s expense.

In a swipe at Washington, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Tuesday it was unfortunate that some of Turkey’s allies had chosen the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) as a partner in the fight against ISIS in Syria. “The field in Syria at the moment is really very complicated,” said a senior Turkish official, stressing the fast-moving nature of events and the urgent need for agreement. “Anything could happen at any moment.” “Such a harsh step in completely excluding Turkey there will cause a problem for relations between the countries,” the Turkish official said. “Hence a share point must be found. Talks are still continuing.”

[..] Ankara had hoped to advance its strategy in northern Syria by persuading Washington to abandon its Kurdish allies and switch support to Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebel groups for the final assault on Raqqa – a northern Syrian city that is ISIS’s de facto capital. But any hopes of this have faded in recent days. Conflicting US and Turkish agendas have surfaced clearly over Manbij, a city controlled by Kurdish-allied fighters since its capture from ISIS last year. A deployment of US forces there last week deterred a threatened Turkish attack. Foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu made clear Turkish sensitivities about the presence of Kurdish fighters in Manbij, a town Ankara sees as the next stepping stone in creation of a safe zone free of Kurdish influence west of the Euphrates. “We will not allow the YPG’s canton dreams (to come true),” NTV television cited Cavusoglu as saying. “If we go to Manbij and the PYD is there, we will hit them.”

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High time for EU, US to take a stand against Turkey, but the courage is failing.

UN Accuses Turkey Of Abuses Against Kurds In Country’s Southeast (AlJ)

A UN report has accused Turkish security forces of human rights violations during operations against Kurdish fighters in the country’s southeast, drawing an angry response by Turkey which rejected it as “biased”. The report by the UN Human Rights Office on Friday detailed accusations of massive infrastructure destruction, unlawful killings and other serious abuses committed between July 2015 and December 2016 following the collapse of a ceasefire. The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state were engaged in a war for almost 30 years until a 2013 truce was declared and the two sides launched peace talks. The ceasefire largely held until the summer of 2015, and since then the two sides have been engaged in escalating clashes. Turkey, the US and the EU all consider the PKK a “terrorist” group.

The UN said that its study, which was carried through “remote monitoring”, was based on interviews, analysis of information provided by Turkey’s government and NGOs, as well as official records, open source documents, satellite images and other materials. Citing data from various sources, the report said that around 2,000 people were killed in the region between July 2015 and December 2016 amid security operations. “Reports generally put the number of local residents killed at approximately 1,200, of whom an unspecified number may have been involved in violent or non-violent actions against the state,” it said, adding that about 800 members of security forces were reportedly killed in clashes. More than 355,000 people were displaced and entire neighbourhoods were destroyed in various parts of southeastern Turkey, the report said.

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How could it possibly declare Turkey safe?

Greek Court To Rule On Turkey’s ‘Safe Country’ Status (K.)

Greece’s highest administrative court is expected to rule later this month on whether Turkey can be considered a safe country for refugees being returned under a deal with the European Union. The Council of State’s plenary on Friday heard arguments based on the appeal of two Syrian nationals whose asylum applications were rejected by the Greek Asylum Committee. The Syrians’ lawyers argued that the rejection is a violation of the UN Charter of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention as the committee based its decision solely on Turkey’s assurances, without a proper assessment of conditions in the neighboring country.

Another plaintiff acting on their behalf, the Greek Council for Refugees, has also raised questions regarding the partiality of the judges serving on the Asylum Committee’s panels. The appeal comes after seven judges at the Council of State’s Fourth Chamber ruled in favor of the Asylum Committee’s decision, saying that Turkey’s participation in the Geneva Convention defines it as a safe country. If the plenary upholds the Syrians’ appeal, this could undermine the deal signed between the European Union and Turkey a year ago for the latter to take back rejected asylum claimants in exchange for financial assistance.

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Yada yada.

Lagarde Insists On Greek Debt Restructuring (K.)

International Monetary Fund (IMF) chief Christine Lagarde has reiterated that Greece’s mountainous debt needs restructuring. Speaking to French newspaper Le Parisien, Lagarde insisted that the IMF can only join the Greek program if Athens implements more reforms and the country’s debt is made manageable. “We also need a sustainable debt,” she told the paper, adding that this could be done in different ways, including an extension of loan repayment periods and lower interest rates. She also said she was trying to convince European leaders to accept that Greece needs debt relief.

Meanwhile, representatives of Greece’s international creditors were expected to leave the capital on Friday without having reached an agreement with government officials on contentious issues including pension reform and overhauls to labor rights and the tax system. The IMF said some progress was made but differences “remain in important areas.” Despite the insistence by European officials that a conclusion of the bailout review is unlikely before May, the Greek government indicated that there is enough time for an agreement significantly sooner than that though probably not in time for a March 20 Eurogroup.

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Sounds very familiar 😉

Roman Citizens Are Breaking The Law To Feed And Help Refugees (R.)

Volunteers served macaroni in marinara sauce to dozens of migrants outside one of Rome’s biggest train stations this week, offering help to travelers largely ignored by institutions on the frontline of Europe’s migrant crisis. While other European cities including Milan have set up information centers and shelters for migrants, Rome has repeatedly cleared out impromptu camps citing security concerns. “We’ve had 13 evictions,” Andrea Costa, director of the Baobab Experience group of volunteers, said before the migrants settled in for a cold night. To keep from being cleared out yet again, volunteers cook meals at home and bring them to a bare plaza outside Tiburtina station where tents are set up at 9 p.m. and taken down in the early morning. There are now 50 migrants staying here, mostly from Africa, as they attempt to reach other European countries.

That number is expected to soar this summer with sea arrivals to Italy up 60% already this year after setting a record last year. “With boat arrivals at this pace, in a little while we’ll have hundreds of people to take care of,” Costa said. Baobab saw between 500 and 1,000 migrants per day last summer, and volunteers have helped almost 63,000 migrants over the past two years with no state funding – only donations. Robel Tesfit, a 27-year-old Eritrean-Ethiopian who everybody calls “Bob,” arrived in Italy by sea in 2015, hoping to reach Britain where he wanted “to play for Manchester United.” He never made it to Britain, and returned to Rome where he was granted asylum. Now he uses his knowledge of Italian, Arabic, Tigrinya and Amharic to help Baobab volunteers, who gave him food, shelter and advice on his journey.

Pointing to the men and women lining up for pasta, he said: “When I arrived, I was the same as them.” While Italy has shelters to house 175,000 asylum seekers, it does not fund structures for migrants in transit, in part because the European Union wants to stop migrants from moving on, not help them to do so. EU law says they must seek asylum in the country where they first set foot. At the end of last year, Rome set aside about 60 beds in a nearby Red Cross center for travelers and officials say they want to renovate a hotel near the station to provide beds for about 100 more.

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20 million people. And we think about the value of our houses. And where to go on holiday.

World Faces Worst Humanitarian Crisis Since 1945 – UN (G.)

The world faces the largest humanitarian crisis since the end of the second world war with more than 20 million people in four countries facing starvation and famine, a senior United Nations official has warned. Without collective and coordinated global efforts, “people will simply starve to death” and “many more will suffer and die from disease”, Stephen O’Brien, the UN under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the security council in New York on Friday that He urged an immediate injection of funds for Yemen, South Sudan, Somalia and northeast Nigeria plus safe and unimpeded access for humanitarian aid “to avert a catastrophe.” “To be precise,” O’Brien said, “we need $4.4bn by July”. Unless there was a major infusion of money, he said, children would be stunted by severe malnutrition and would not be able to go to school, gains in economic development would be reversed and “livelihoods, futures and hope lost”.

UN and food organisations define famine as when more than 30% of children under age 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and mortality rates are two or more deaths per 10,000 people every day, among other criteria. “Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest humanitarian crisis since the creation of the United Nations [in 1945],” O’Brien said. “Now, more than 20 million people across four countries face starvation and famine.” O’Brien said the largest humanitarian crisis was in Yemen where two-thirds of the population — 18.8 million people — need aid and more than seven million people are hungry and did not know where their next meal would come from. “That is three million people more than in January,” he said.

[..] For 2017, O’Brien said $2.1bn was needed to reach 12 million Yemenis “with life-saving assistance and protection” but only 6% has been received so far. He announced that secretary-general Antonio Guterres will chair a pledging conference for Yemen on 25 April in Geneva. The UN humanitarian chief also visited South Sudan, the world’s newest nation which has been ravaged by a three-year civil war, and said “the situation is worse than it has ever been.” “The famine in South Sudan is man-made,” he said. “Parties to the conflict are parties to the famine — as are those not intervening to make the violence stop.” O’Brien said more than 7.5 million people need aid, up by 1.4 million from last year, and about 3.4 million South Sudanese are displaced by fighting including almost 200,000 who have fled the country since January.

“More than one million children are estimated to be acutely malnourished across the country, including 270,000 children who face the imminent risk of death should they not be reached in time with assistance,” he said.

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