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Debt Rattle April 17 2025

Apr 172025
 
 April 17, 2025  Posted by at 9:54 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  33 Responses »


Piet Mondriaan Trafalgar Square 1939-43

 

• What Is a Woman? The UK Supreme Court Knows the Answer (Margolis)
• Trump Shot Down Israel’s Plan To Attack Iran – NYT (RT)
• New York AG Letitia James Accused of Alleged Mortgage Fraud (Turley)
• Judge to Trump Administration: I Feel Unfacilitated (Turley)
• Judge Boasberg Floats ‘Criminal Contempt’ Against Trump Admin (ZH)
• Scott Jennings Schools CNN Panel Over Gang Member’s Deportation (PJM)
• OpenAI Planning To Take On Musk’s X (RT)
• Trump Is Right to Hammer Environmental Lawfare (DS)
• What Can We Expect from the Peace Negotiations? (Paul Craig Roberts)
• ‘Stop Blackmailing’ – China to US (RT)
• US To Restrict China’s Access in Exchange for Fewer Tariffs on Allies (Sp.)
• US To Tie Tariff Deals To China Curbs – WSJ (RT)
• Dutch MPs Call For Ban On Amplified Islamic Calls To Prayer (RMX)
• Belgium Eyes Welfare Cuts To Meet NATO Target (RT)
• Trump Confronts Economic and Geopolitical Reality (Ring)

 

 


Longhorn beetle’s face.

 

 

Genetics

Hero

AI

CCP

Macleod

Bukele taxes
https://twitter.com/MAGAVoice/status/1912335542806802689

Flynn

Tucker Bernier

 

 

 

 

From a bit of an unexpected corner, but we’ll take it. A man’s no. 1 duty is to protect women, and that was not happening.

• What Is a Woman? The UK Supreme Court Knows the Answer (Margolis)

The U.K. Supreme Court delivered a landmark ruling Wednesday that affirmed that the legal definition of “woman” refers specifically to those born biologically female, excluding biological men who “identify” as women from that category. The decision marks a major course correction after years of gender ideology sweeping Europe. The AP reports: “Several women’s groups that supported the appeal celebrated outside court and hailed it as a major victory in their effort to protect spaces designated for women. “Everyone knows what sex is and you can’t change it,” said Susan Smith, co-director of For Women Scotland, which brought the case. “It’s common sense, basic common sense and the fact that we have been down a rabbit hole where people have tried to deny science and to deny reality and hopefully this will now see us back to, back to reality.” The ruling brings some clarity in the U.K. to a controversial issue that has roiled politics as women, parents, LGBTQ+ groups, lawmakers and athletes have debated gender identity rights.”

This wasn’t some razor-thin ruling divided on ideological grounds. The UK Supreme Court ruled unanimously, with all five judges in agreement: under the Equality Act, biological men can be lawfully excluded from women-only spaces and services even if they “identify” as women. That includes places like changing rooms, female-only shelters, swimming areas, and women-centered medical or counseling services. The court made it explicit that even a transgender person holding a certificate legally recognizing them as female does not qualify as a “woman” under equality law. As far as I know, none of the judges on the UK Supreme Court are biologists, yet they were able to answer the question “What is a woman?” when Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson couldn’t do the same when asked during her confirmation hearings.

The case stems from a 2018 law passed by the Scottish Parliament stating there should be a 50% female representation on the boards of Scottish public bodies. Transgender women with gender recognition certificates were to be included in meeting the quota. “Interpreting ‘sex’ as certificated sex would cut across the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ … and, thus, the protected characteristic of sex in an incoherent way,” Hodge said. “It would create heterogeneous groupings.” Hannah Ford, an employment lawyer, said that while the judgment will provide clarity, it would be a setback for transgender rights and there would be “an uphill battle” to ensure workplaces are welcoming places for trans people. “This will be really wounding for the trans community,” Ford told Sky News. Groups that had challenged the Scottish government popped the cork on a bottle of champagne outside the court and sang, “women’s rights are human rights.”

The UK Supreme Court’s landmark ruling defining women based on biological sex isn’t just a victory for common sense; it’s a desperately needed course correction following years of radical gender ideology being legitimized worldwide. Thankfully, President Donald Trump has been fighting to bring this return to sanity to America, despite relentless opposition from radical leftists and activist judges who seem determined to deny basic biological reality.

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Looks like a narrow escape. Bombing Iran is sheer stupidity. A country that has always said it doesn’t want nukes, for religious reasons. Good to see multiple cabinet members get input.

• Trump Shot Down Israel’s Plan To Attack Iran – NYT (RT)

US President Donald Trump has rejected Israel’s proposal to strike Iran’s nuclear sites, The New York Times reported on Wednesday evening, citing White House officials and others familiar with the matter. Trump reportedly chose instead to pursue a new deal with Tehran.According to the Times, Israel had drafted plans to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in early May, aiming to delay its ability to develop a nuclear weapon by a year or more. After considering a combination of airstrikes and commando raids, the Jewish state reportedly proposed “an extensive bombing campaign” that would have lasted more than a week. Israeli officials had hoped that the US would not only greenlight the operation but also actively support it.

Trump, however, shot down the plan earlier this month, following a “rough consensus” in the White House. Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard were among the top administration members who reportedly raised concerns that the strikes would “spark a wider conflict with Iran.” Iran and Israel exchanged strikes in April and October of last year, marking the most dramatic escalation between the regional arch-rivals.

Trump tore up the 2015 UN-backed agreement on Iran’s nuclear program during his first term in office. The president accused Tehran of secretly violating the deal and reimposed sanctions. Iran responded by rolling back its own compliance with the accord and accelerating its enrichment of uranium. Last month, Trump threatened to bomb Iran “if they don’t make a deal,” to which the Islamic Republic vowed not to bow to pressure. Despite the belligerent rhetoric, the US and Iran held a first round of talks in Oman on Saturday. The negotiations took place in a “productive, calm and positive atmosphere,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1912670170977382901

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She deserves it.

• New York AG Letitia James Accused of Alleged Mortgage Fraud (Turley)

“No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.” Those words by New York state Attorney General Letitia James echoed throughout the media, lionizing her after her office secured a judgment against Donald Trump for false business practices, including misrepresentations on loan documents. They may echo even louder this week as James finds herself the subject of a criminal referral for committing alleged financial fraud to secure her own property loans. On April 14, William J. Pulte, Director of US Federal Housing (FHFA), sent a referral letter to the Justice Department detailing alleged false statements made in filings by James to secure housing loans. For an attorney general who just prosecuted Trump for everything short of ripping a label off a mattress, the irony is crushing.

The alleged false statements are particularly damning for someone who insisted that she had zero tolerance for such irregularities or errors in financial filings. Indeed, the greatest danger is that the Letitia James standard could be applied to Letitia James in guaranteeing that “no one is above the law.” The allegations against James run from the demonstrably false to the downright bizarre. In securing a loan for a home in Norfolk, Va., James is accused of claiming through her representative that the property would be her principal residence. As the referral notes, primary residences receive more advantageous rates. However, as “the sitting New York Attorney General of New York [James] is required by law to have her primary residence in the state of New York.” Notably, the Justice Department has prosecuted those who have committed this common fraud.

For example, in 2017, it charged a man in Puerto Rico with false statements on a reverse mortgage loan application in which he falsely claimed the property as his principal residence. It emphasized that “mortgage lenders provide capital so people can purchase homes, not enrich themselves illegally.” There are other such cases under 18 U.S.C. 1014 and related laws. James could claim that these representations were made by a third party acting on her behalf. However, that is precisely the argument that she repeatedly rejected in the Trump case, insisting that he was legally obligated to review all filings made in his name or that of his companies. James is also accused of misrepresenting a five-unit property in Brooklyn as a four-unit property “to receive better interest rates … and to receive mortgage assistance through [the Home Affordable Modification Program].”

The referral also includes a claim that James filed papers that listed herself and her father as a married couple. The referral notes that just last year, Baltimore’s State Attorney, Marilyn Mosby, was convicted by the Biden administration of filing a false mortgage application. Another case resulted in a guilty plea last week for fraudulent filings in a home loan. The timing for James could not be worse. The Trump civil case has languished on appeal for months with a long overdue opinion. The appellate argument did not go well for James in the case that resulted in a grotesque half-billion-dollar fine in a case where no one lost a dime. James accused Trump of inflating property value in filings, a common practice in the real estate field. It did not matter that the company warned banks to do their own evaluations. It did not matter that bank officials testified that they made money on the deal. Indeed, the “victim” wanted more business from Trump. None of that matters.

James not only demanded an even greater fine but wanted to foreclose on Trump properties after Trump was told to secure a ridiculous $455 million bond to simply secure appellate review. Throughout that case, James repeated her mantra that there would be no exceptions for the rich and powerful. She insisted that accuracy on such financial records is essential and must be rigorously enforced. Many of us objected that James was selectively targeting Trump after she ran for office on the pledge to nail him on some unspecified offense.

James insisted that this was not lawfare and that she would prosecute anyone guilty of false or misleading statements on financial filings. She is now allegedly that person. It is not clear what James’ defense will be to these allegations. However, she may cite the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Thompson v. United States, which ruled in March that 18 U.S.C. § 1014 does not criminalize statements that are merely misleading but are not false. The problem is that, if proven, these statements are not misleading. They are false.

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Two separate judges are on the MS-13 case.

• Judge to Trump Administration: I Feel Unfacilitated (Turley)

After the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, I wrote a column disagreeing with the media coverage that claimed that the Trump Administration was ordered to return Garcia to the United States from El Salvador. The Administration mistakingly sent Garcia to a foreign prison. However, the Court only ordered that the Administration “facilitate” such a return, a term it failed to define. Now, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis is indicating that she feels unfacilitated, but it is unclear how a court should address this curious writ of facilitation. After the ruling, many on the left claimed “Supreme Court in a unanimous decision: He has a legal right to be here, and you have to bring him back.” The Court actually warned that the district court could order the government to facilitate but not necessarily “to effectuate” the return.

“The application is granted in part and denied in part, subject to the direction of this order. Due to the administrative stay issued by THE CHIEF JUSTICE, the deadline imposed by the District Court has now passed. To that extent, the Government’s emergency application is effectively granted in part and the deadline in the challenged order is no longer effective. The rest of the District Court’s order remains in effect but requires clarification on remand. The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador. The intended scope of the term “effectuate” in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority. The District Court should clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs. For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps. The order heretofore entered by THE CHIEF JUSTICE is vacated.”

So what does that mean? As I asked in the column, “what if the Trump Administration says that inquiries were made, but the matter has proven intractable or unresolvable? Crickets.” The Administration has made clear that it views the orders as meaning that, if El Salvador brings Garcia to its doorstep, it must open the door. The court clearly has a different interpretation. Judge Xinis said yesterday, “I’ve gotten nothing. I’ve gotten no real response, and no real legal justification for not answering,” she continued, adding that if the administration is not going to answer her questions “then justify why. That’s what we do in this house.” There is nothing worse than a feeling of being unfacilitated, but how does the court measure good faith facilitation? Garcia is an El Salvadorian citizen in an El Salvadorian prison. The refusal of El Salvador to send the accused MS-13 gang member back effectively ends the question on any return.

Many of us suspect that El Salvador would send back Garcia if asked, but how can a court measure the effort of an Administration in communications with a foreign country? Judge Xinis is suggesting that she will be holding someone in contempt. However, this is a discussion occurring at the highest level. Would a formal request be enough? Is Judge Xinis suggesting that the court can require punitive or coercive measures against a foreign country to facilitate a change in its position? The fact is that a unanimous decision of the Court is not hard when no one can say conclusively what the order means. If Judge Xinis is going to move ahead with new orders, it will find its way back to the Supreme Court.

The Court clearly (and correctly) held that Garcia deserves due process and that this removal was a mistake. As I have previously stated, the Administration should have brought him back for proper deportation. I still believe that. However, the Court also held that the President’s Article II authority over foreign policy has to weigh heavily in such questions. As the court goes down this road, it can quickly get bogged down in subjective judgments on what constitutes facilitation. That is the can kicked down the road by the Supreme Court and it is now likely to come rattling back to the justices.

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The de facto ruler of America.

• Judge Boasberg Floats ‘Criminal Contempt’ Against Trump Admin (ZH)

US District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that “probable cause exists” to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt for ignoring oral instructions to turn a plane full of alleged Venezuelan gang members around mid-flight, despite the US Supreme Court determining that Boasberg’s court was an improper venue for the case altogether – and vacating two of his temporary restraining orders related to the case. “The Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Boasberg wrote in a “46-page rant” (as Julie Kelly puts it). “The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” Boasberg continues. “None of their responses has been satisfactory.” Oh, and if the DOJ won’t prosecute the Trump admin’s alleged contempt, “the Court will “appoint another attorney to prosecute the contempt.””

https://twitter.com/julie_kelly2/status/1912553159269949783?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1912553159269949783%7Ctwgr%5Ea3688f29ee12125fd4b2930b336905f62a939345%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fpresident-jeb-boasberg-floats-criminal-contempt-against-trump-admin-over-deportations

That said, the Supreme Court is partially to blame here over their refusal to draw clear boundaries for District court judges… Which has created a complete shit-show…

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“There’s no version of this man’s life where he comes back.”

• Scott Jennings Schools CNN Panel Over Gang Member’s Deportation (PJM)

CNN’s Scott Jennings was having none of the hand-wringing on Monday’s panel discussion over the Trump administration’s handling of the deportation of MS-13 gang member Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — the latest cause célèbre of the radical left. While the liberals on the panel tiptoed around legal technicalities and rhetorical posturing, Jennings delivered a blunt reality check that left the rest of the table scrambling. Anchor Abby Phillip tried to tee up criticism of Trump by focusing on “the optics” of sending “Americans” to El Salvador — even though Abrego Garcia is an illegal immigrant. But Jennings wasn’t distracted. “Yes. He said they were studying the laws. I mean, there wasn’t any definitive statement,” he clarified, before cutting right to the core of the debate: “I think you guys need to understand, for the Trump administration, there’s no version of this man’s life that ends up with him living in the United States.”

Jennings laid out the Trump administration’s reasoning without flinching: “He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador who came to the country illegally, who has a deportation order, who, in their view and in the view of some immigration courts, has an affiliation with MS-13.” Phillip tried to interject by claiming that Garcia’s affiliation with MS-13 isn’t definitive because Abrego Garcia “strongly disputes in court.” Well, I guess that settles it, right? “I’m telling you that their view of it is that… it’s an El Salvador citizen who was sent back to El Salvador, who was in the country illegally,” Jennings reiterated. “According to some people in his long process… he has an existing deportation order, [and they] believe he has an affiliation with MS-13.” Then Jennings repeated his knockout point: “There’s no version of this man’s life where he comes back.”

As the panel continued to push the narrative of unjust exile, Jennings laid out the consequences if Abrego Garcia is returned. “If the president of El Salvador releases him and we do facilitate his return, when he lands in this country, one of two things will happen,” Jennings explained. “He’ll either be arrested… or sent to another country that I promise you you don’t want to go to. He’s not going to be allowed to come back and live in this country as though he is a U.S. citizen.” Harvard Law’s Jay Michaelson jumped in with the melodramatic accusation, “That’s literally the definition of tyranny, right?” Umm, no? What are they teaching at Harvard Law these days? Seriously.

Michaelson continued, “So, here’s what’s going to happen: We’re going to throw him in jail. No, there’s a thing called the rule of law and due process, which has not been followed in this case. And if I have a slightly optimistic take on this; I actually think this is going to come back to bite the Trump administration. Because what’s going to happen is the next time this goes up the court system, they have absolutely zero credibility to say, Don’t worry, you can file a habeas petition. You can get your person back.” But Jennings coolly reminded the panel, “They have the ability to deport people who have deportation orders.” He added that Garcia “got due process. He has a deportation order.”

Later, he dissected the legal victory Trump’s team got last week. “The reason the administration believes they got a big win at the Supreme Court is because the district court was trying to compel the executive on foreign affairs. The Supreme Court threw that out,” Jennings explained. “The courts have long recognized that they cannot compel the executive on foreign policy matters.” As for the politics? Jennings didn’t sugarcoat it. “What they also believe is that, politically, the American people want them to be as aggressive as possible… to solve a crisis that has festered for years,” he asserted. Then he drove the moral argument home with a chilling reminder: “We keep calling this guy ‘Maryland man’ in the press. Nobody seems to worry about the Maryland mother, Rachel Morin, who was murdered by someone that the previous administration let out of jail.”

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Social media without people. Just AI bots.

• OpenAI Planning To Take On Musk’s X (RT)

OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company best known for ChatGPT, has reportedly been working on a new social media app similar to Elon Musk’s X. The early prototype features a feed centered on AI-generated images, according to sources familiar with the project cited by The Verge on Sunday. The experimental platform reportedly includes a social media feed and is being tested internally. CEO Sam Altman has also been seeking private feedback from individuals outside the company, the outlet reported. It remains unclear whether OpenAI intends to release the project as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which was the most downloaded app worldwide last month, with 46 million new downloads, according to Appfigures.

OpenAI’s potential social media network “would likely increase Altman’s already-bitter rivalry with Elon Musk,” The Verge writes. Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI but left the company in 2018. In February, Musk offered $97.4 billion to acquire OpenAI, but Altman rejected the offer, reportedly saying, “no thank you but we will buy twitter [now known as X] for $9.74 billion if you want,” according to The Verge. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, could also be in OpenAI’s sights. The report noted that Meta is planning to launch its own AI assistant app with a social media feed. Following reports that Meta is building a ChatGPT rival, Altman responded on X in February: “ok fine maybe we’ll do a social app.”

Having a social media platform would reportedly allow OpenAI to collect unique real-time user data to enhance its AI models, similar to how Meta and Musk’s xAI currently operate, according to The Verge. Musk has merged his AI company xAI with X. Grok is a chatbot developed by xAI. It has been integrated with X and pulls content from the platform to inform its responses. According to a source from another AI lab cited by the Verge, “The Grok integration with X has made everyone jealous,” particularly regarding its role in helping users create viral content. It is reportedly uncertain whether OpenAI’s social media prototype will be released publicly.

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“Making America Great Again” has to include energy dominance and eradicating the barriers to innovation and growth at all levels of government, including courtrooms.”

• Trump Is Right to Hammer Environmental Lawfare (DS)

President Donald Trump’s critics are right about one thing: The first few months of his second term have been a reckoning. Starting with the federal government’s pursuit of law firms and organizations that committed lawfare against the president to hobble his political comeback, Trump has now supercharged executive authority to stop the flood of ideologically based lawsuits targeting America’s energy providers. In an executive order signed last week, Trump empowered Attorney General Pam Bondi to turn up the heat on local prosecutors and state attorneys general abusing the legal system with lawsuits against energy companies. He is right to do so. “Making America Great Again” has to include energy dominance and eradicating the barriers to innovation and growth at all levels of government, including courtrooms.

Trump has directed Bondi to “expeditiously take all appropriate action to stop the enforcement of state laws and continuation of civil actions” that threaten American energy dominance, including restrictive rules and civil actions against oil, natural gas, hydroelectricity, and nuclear energy projects. What Trump is specifically targeting here is the well-resourced cadre of state attorneys general and liability “lawfare” firms that have deployed creative legal strategies to try to extract money from companies by claiming they’ve committed “climate” crimes. This genre of lawsuit relies on the alleged violation of state nuisance or consumer deception laws, and litigators argue that the energy companies actively strove to mislead the public about their products’ impact on the climate.

A local lawsuit in North Carolina against Duke Energy, one of the largest nuclear energy utilities in the nation, provides the most baffling case. Officials in the small suburb town of Carrboro want the company to pay for the “climate-related harm” caused by its electricity generation, even though Duke Energy’s carbon-free nuclear energy fleet powers half the homes in North and South Carolina, and the region’s use of natural gas is one of the lowest per capita in the country. Climate lawfare has a direct impact on consumers who rely on affordable energy of all types by forcing these companies to beef up their legal departments rather than improving the delivery of their goods and services. The end result is higher prices for consumers who already live on tight budgets due to the rising cost of living in other areas of the economy.

Most, if not all, of these cases are filed in blue states and launched by attorneys on behalf of city governments such as Honolulu; Boulder, Colorado; and San Francisco. The states of Minnesota, Oregon, Vermont, Maine, New York, and California each have their own lawsuits aimed at recouping the “costs” of climate change on local communities and enforcing “net-zero” energy policies. Net-zero policies seek to rapidly choke off fossil fuel use in order to reach zero carbon emissions by reducing them as well as removing them from the atmosphere and relying on renewable energy sources such as wind, solar, and sometimes, nuclear power. Oil companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell, and BP get hit hardest, but like in the case of Duke Energy in North Carolina, electricity utility companies get dragged into the mess as well.

But as far as messes go, it’s one carefully orchestrated by the climate litigation industry, armed with deep pockets and patience in its quest to pull the rug out from under Big Energy. That’s why Trump’s revamp of federalism to review many of these laws and statutes is not only legal but deeply necessary. Consumers who need affordable energy and who rely on continued innovation from the companies that power their lives should not have their standard of living cut by greedy environmental lawyers jamming up district courts where judges are ideologically inclined to their side. In March, the Supreme Court declined to weigh in on the deluge of Democrat state-led climate lawsuits, denying the request by red states to put a halt to the lawfare.

In their dissent, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito made clear that the court was punting on a vital constitutional case “for policy reasons.” When the Supreme Court refuses to address the obvious abuse of our litigation system for energy providers and the consumers that rely on them, the intervention of the executive branch becomes a necessity. The most likely unconstitutional state statutes that enable these costly lawsuits should meet the wrath of a president willing to exercise some federal authority. Trump has answered that call, and at least on this specific issue, he’s proved that our government’s unique balancing act between state and federal power does make it possible to get important things done for Americans.

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PCR won’t give Putin a break. But Putin has a problem with dead Ukrainians: they’re Russia’s brothers.

• What Can We Expect from the Peace Negotiations? (Paul Craig Roberts)

Are the peace negotiations leading anywhere we want to go, or are they leading nowhere, or to more conflict? If I had to bet, I would pick one of the last two choices. Most likely more conflict. It is a tendency of peace negotiations to go nowhere except to a ceasefire that is immediately broken. As for the Ukraine negotiations, the Russians are the only party to the limited cease fire in Ukraine that have kept the agreement. Putin’s reward is to be told by Trump to stop fighting and put Russia’s fate in Washington’s hands or there will be more sanctions. Negotiations tend to keep on continuing, because it is in the interest of the negotiating teams. It is their time of fame. They are in the limelight. They enjoy being important. An agreement would make them invisible again. It is their 15 minutes of fame that they stretch into months and years.

Consider how long peace negotiations have been going on between Israel and Palestine to no effect except the utter and total destruction of Palestine and its people. The same could happen to Russia as the Kremlin seems to consist of 19th century naive liberals. In my recent interview on Dialogue Works I wondered why Iran was negotiating when the solution is to invite inspectors in to see if there is any evidence of nuclear weapons production. I wondered why Putin was negotiating when his real responsibility to Russia is to win the conflict and dictate the peace terms. After all his sad costly experiences with negotiating with Washington, why does Putin desire yet another sad experience? As far as I can tell, I am the only person who has answered the question. Putin is trying to use the conflict to negotiate a Great Powers Agreement like Yalta. If he wins the war, as he should have done long ago, to his way of thinking he loses the chance for a new Yalta that naive Russian foreign affairs commentators are talking about.

My view differs from Putin’s. If he won the war, especially if he had done so right away, Russia would be recognized as a great power worthy of a Great Power Agreement. Instead, by preventing the Russian military from winning, Putin has convinced the West that Russia is not a formidable military force, and that its leadership is irresolute. Among the consequences, we have today the French and British considering sending their soldiers to fight against Russia in Ukraine. Only Putin’s irresolution could have convinced the British and French that they could take on Russia. We also have Baltic countries with small populations engaging in unresisted and unanswered aggression against Russia. Both Estonia and Finland have moved to use military force to capture and detain Russian oil tankers.

If you were the captain of a Russian oil tanker delivering oil to somewhere in Europe, you might already be wondering why your government is fueling the ability of its enemies to wage war against Russia. But when you are boarded by a two-bit country whose population is less than Moscow’s and the Kremlin does not intervene, what do you think about the world’s respect for your country? You must be heart-broken. Powerful Russia humiliated by Estonia! Putin does not think about these things. His focus is only on negotiation. He is wedded to it, firmly. He might even be a little crazed by it. It is all that is important. He won’t respond to humiliations because it might queer the all-important negotiations. So the smallest countries on earth can humiliate Russia at will.

This must affect the Russian population, unless they have been so corrupted by Western “culture” that they are no longer Russian. That is the case with many of the Russian intellectuals. If Russia can’t be a part of the West, they feel isolated and alone. Decades of Washington’s propaganda succeeded in diminishing the Russian in them. From the day that Putin, who had erroneously relied on negotiations, was forced by Washington to intervene in Donbas, Putin and his foreign minister have not ceased bleating how welcoming they would be of peace negotiations. Consequently, no one in Western governments thought, or think today, that the Kremlin has an ounce of resolve on the battlefield. This is the problem Putin caused himself.

Do you remember Prigozhin and the Wagner Group? The Wagner Group was the essentially private military force under the command of Yevgeny Prigozhin that Putin had to rely upon when he belatedly intervened in Ukraine. Having erroneously relied on the Minsk Agreement, which the West used to deceive Putin, Putin had no military force prepared to deal with the massive Ukrainian army Washington had trained and equipped. Prigozhin found Putin’s way of fighting a war problematical. He said his top echelon troops were being required to take casualties but were prohibited from fighting to win. The dissatisfaction of the troops with Putin’s strictures that prevented victory, led to a protest march on Moscow, which the jealous Russian General Staff misrepresented as a “rebellion.” Prigozhin was removed and later died in a mysterious airplane crash, and the Wagner Group was broken up, thereby depriving Russia of its hardest hitting military force. This is a huge sacrifice in behalf of a distant possible negotiated settlement.

Prigozhin wasn’t alone. The second most effective Russian force were the Muslim troops from Chechnya. Their leader also complained that his force had to take casualties but were prevented from winning. He asked publicly, why can’t we get this conflict over with? I think the answer is that Putin thinks a negotiated settlement possibly leading to a Great Power Agreement is more important than the reputation of Russian military arms and Russian and Ukrainian casualties. If Washington comes to my conclusion, the settlement imposed on Putin will look good on paper but will perpetuate American hegemony. I have said many times that Putin does not need a mutual security agreement with the West. He does not need a New Yalta. Russia needs a mutual security agreement with China and Iran. A mutual security agreement of these three powers would end all wars. The US, NATO, Israel cannot possibly confront these three countries militarily.

But there is no agreement. Why? Is it a lack of vision of Russian, Chinese, and Iranian leaders? Or is it distrust between them? Russia and Iran walked away from Syria, leaving the country to Israel, Washington, and Turkey. Why wouldn’t they walk away from one another? China, knows that if China wished, China could crush Taiwan, with or without US support to Taiwan, in a few hours. But Putin can’t defeat outclassed Ukraine in more than three years, longer than it took Stalin’s Red Army to destroy the powerful German Wehrmacht, driving the Germans out of thousands of miles of Russia, Eastern Europe, and arriving in the streets of Berlin in a shorter time than Putin has been fighting over a few kilometers in Donbas. China must wonder what sort of military help would Russia be?

My conclusion is, and I much regret it, it is not a conclusion I want, that Putin has so badly handled the Ukrainian situation, the pipeline, and all other matters with Washington that the only agreement that can be reached is Russia’s surrender. Putin has shown no will to fight, only to engage in fruitless negotiation. Putin rolls out all of Russia’s superior weapons systems, which clearly are superior to anything the West has. But no one in the West believes he would use them. Putin has failed to present himself and his country as entities that must be contended with on their terms. Consequently, Putin is dismissed by Trump as someone to be bossed around, and by militarily impotent Britain and France who are talking about sending their soldiers to Ukraine to defeat Russia.

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Blackmail? Is that what it is?

• ‘Stop Blackmailing’ – China to US (RT)

China has called on the US to “stop threatening and blackmailing,” if it wants to resolve the escalating trade dispute between the two countries through dialogue. Beijing has stressed that it will continue to protect its interests in the face of US pressure. The two countries have implemented a series of reciprocal tariff hikes over the past two months, with the US imposing a cumulative rate of 145% last week. On Tuesday, the White House warned that Chinese imports to the US could face tariffs as high as 245%, and claimed the ball is in China’s court. “If the United States really wants to solve the problem through dialogue and negotiation, it should give up the extreme pressure, stop threatening and blackmailing,” Foreign Ministry Spokesman Lin Jian told journalists on Wednesday.

The diplomat reiterated that the tariff war was initiated by the US and stated that China’s response was aimed at safeguarding its legitimate rights and interests. Beijing’s retaliation has included a hike to 125% on all American imports, a suspension of global shipments of rare-earth metals and magnets used in tech and military industries. In addition, Beijing ordered Chinese airlines to stop accepting Boeing jets and parts, according to Bloomberg. President Donald Trump previously suggested that the “proud” Chinese want to make a deal, they “just don’t know how quite to go about it.” The Chinese authorities have meanwhile insisted that “the door remains open” for negotiation with the US, but dialogue must be based on mutual respect. The Ministry of Commerce last week dismissed the multiple rounds of duties imposed by the US on China as “numbers game” with no practical meaning and vowed to “fight to the end.”

Read more …

The US wants to prevent China from using third countries to circumvent tarriffs.

• US To Restrict China’s Access in Exchange for Fewer Tariffs on Allies (Sp.)

During negotiations with more than 70 countries, the US administration plans to secure commitments from trade partners to economically isolate China in exchange for lower tariffs imposed by the White House, The Wall Street Journal newspaper reported. The White House plans to convince countries to prohibit China from transporting goods through their territories, the report said on Tuesday, adding that Washington also wants to ban Chinese companies from locating in these countries in order to circumvent US tariffs, and prevent cheap Chinese industrial goods from entering their markets.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has become one of the key developers of this strategy, the report read. In his opinion, in the near future, such agreements can be reached primarily with Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, South Korea and India. On April 2, US President Donald Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on imports from various countries, establishing a baseline rate of 10%. The tariffs were intended to be adjusted based on the rates charged by those countries on US goods. However, on April 9, Trump declared a 90-day pause on tariffs for all countries except China and lowered the rate to 10% to facilitate negotiations.

Read more …

“The ball is in China’s court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said..”

• US To Tie Tariff Deals To China Curbs – WSJ (RT)

The US plans to use tariff negotiations to push trade partners to scale back economic ties with China, the Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the talks. The strategy is reportedly aimed at securing commitments from countries hit by recent US tariff hikes to help isolate China’s economy and pressure Beijing to negotiate. US President Donald Trump announced new “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly 90 countries earlier this month, citing unfair trade practices. After global markets reacted by dropping sharply and several governments sought exemptions, he paused most of the tariffs for 90 days, reducing them to a baseline rate of 10%. However, the pause does not apply to China, whose exports to the US are now subject to tariffs of up to 145% amid an ongoing tit-for-tat trade war.

US officials aim to convince trade partners to accept permanent tariff cuts in exchange for curbing their economic engagement with China, according to the WSJ. Proposed commitments may vary by country, but could reportedly include stopping China from rerouting exports through third-party nations, banning Chinese firms from setting up operations locally to avoid US tariffs, and limiting imports of low-cost Chinese industrial goods. Sources said the measures are meant to undermine China’s economy and reduce its leverage ahead of potential negotiations between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping. The US has already raised the proposal in early discussions with some countries, sources claimed.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was reportedly one of the main architects of the plan. Sources claimed he presented the strategy to Trump during an April 6 meeting at Mar-a-Lago, arguing that obtaining concessions from partners could prevent China from evading tariffs and export controls. He previously named the UK, Australia, South Korea, India, and Japan as countries likely to finalize trade agreements with Washington in the near future.

The White House and Treasury Department declined to comment on the WSJ report. On Tuesday, Trump urged China to initiate negotiations to resolve the tariff dispute. “The ball is in China’s court. China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, quoting a statement she claimed was dictated by the president. Beijing, however, has so far refused to back down. On Friday, China announced it would impose a 125% tariff on all US goods, reiterating it will “fight to the end” against Washington’s trade policy. Beijing also signaled this could be the last increase, noting that “at the current tariff level, there is no market acceptance for US goods exported to China,” while adding that other countermeasures are being considered.

Read more …

You grow up in Holland and you’re forced to hear the call to Muslim prayer 5x a day. Get real.

• Dutch MPs Call For Ban On Amplified Islamic Calls To Prayer (RMX)

Two minor conservative parties in the Netherlands, the SGP and JA21, have tabled a private members’ bill aiming to ban amplified Islamic calls to prayer in residential areas, arguing that the practice is increasingly at odds with Dutch cultural norms. The proposed legislation, submitted by SGP MP André Flach and JA21 leader Joost Eerdmans, targets the growing use of loudspeakers in mosques to broadcast the adhan — the Islamic call to prayer — across neighborhoods. While amplified calls were rare until the 1990s, the MPs claim they are now heard in dozens of communities nationwide, “from Amsterdam to Alblasserdam.” “It doesn’t fit in with Dutch culture,” Flach said, as cited by De Telegraaf newspaper. He noted that current broadcasts loudly proclaim religious texts such as “Allah is the greatest” and “there is no other god but Allah” several times a day. He argued that when laws were changed in 1988 to allow amplified religious calls under the Public Manifestations Act, lawmakers did not anticipate how pervasive and loud such calls might become.

Eerdmans expressed equal concern over the trend, pointing to what he sees as a steady increase in Islamic practice seeping into the Dutch way of life. “Today, around 40 mosques play the adhan on Fridays, but with about 500 mosques in the Netherlands and that number growing, how many will there be in 10 years?” sIn some neighborhoods, “you really feel like you’re in Istanbul or Marrakesh,” he added. The MPs also cited a poll commissioned from researcher Maurice de Hond, which claims that nearly 80 percent of Dutch citizens view amplified calls to prayer as inconsistent with Dutch culture and find them bothersome. While the government had already signaled plans to tighten regulations on amplified prayer calls earlier this year, Flach and Eerdmans are pushing for a complete ban on sound amplification for such broadcasts.

“This is not about restricting freedom of religion,” Flach insisted. “People can still make the call to prayer, just without sound amplification. The current law simply lacks the word ‘unamplified’ — and we are adding it,” he said. In a statement, JA21 wrote, “More and more Dutch streets are drowned out by amplified Islamic calls to prayer. The public space belongs to everyone – the mosque does not have to rise above it. That is why JA21 and SGP are submitting a private members’ bill to ban the reinforced call.” The proposal follows earlier statements by Integration Secretary Jurgen Nobel, who in February pledged to review existing legislation to better manage noise disturbances from amplified religious expressions. Supporters argue that the measure would restore balance and respond to long-standing complaints from residents in affected areas. The bill will now move to parliamentary debate.

Read more …

Just to get to 2%. Then that becomes 5%. And then Ursula wants $800 billion on top of that.

• Belgium Eyes Welfare Cuts To Meet NATO Target (RT)

Belgium is preparing to raise debt and cut welfare to meet NATO’s minimum military spending target, the EU country’s budget minister has said. Vincent Van Peteghem told the Financial Times on Wednesday that Brussels recently agreed to lift its 2025 military budget to 2% of GDP through a mix of temporary cash injections, creative accounting, and structural reforms. The planned hike in military spending could exacerbate the budget crisis as debt mounts. Recent government plans to cut social services have sparked protests, with over 100,000 people rallying in Brussels in February. Belgium had previously planned to meet the 2% target only by 2029. Military spending currently stands at around 1.31% of GDP, or roughly €8 billion ($8.5 billion), according to Defense Minister Theo Francken.

The shift comes amid pressure from Washington and ahead of a NATO summit in June, where members are expected to consider raising the spending target to above 3% of GDP. US President Donald Trump has urged the bloc members to increase military spending to 5%, warning that countries that fail to do so may no longer be guaranteed American protection. Higher spending on military budgets would take a toll on the EU’s welfare programs, Van Peteghem warned. Last month, the European Commission proposed exempting military budgets from fiscal rules and offering €150 billion in loans as part of its ‘ReArm Europe’ plan, which aims to mobilize up to €800 billion through debt and tax incentives for the bloc’s military-industrial complex.

Van Peteghem said Belgium would tap both options to fund additional military spending this year. To maintain the 2% level, the government plans to raise more debt and may privatize state-owned assets, the minister said. The remaining gap would be filled through spending cuts, including curbs on unemployment benefits, pension reforms, and tax changes. “But of course, we will need to do more,” Van Peteghem, who also serves as deputy prime minister, said. France has also announced plans to cut €5 billion from its budget, with some of the savings potentially redirected to military spending. Moscow has condemned the EU’s military buildup. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called it “a matter of deep concern,” noting that it was aimed at Russia.

Read more …

“That would raise the annual federal interest payment on the national debt to $1.5 trillion. At what point does this become a crisis?”

• Trump Confronts Economic and Geopolitical Reality (Ring)

By the time this is published, everything may have changed, and that is to be expected. Throughout his career, well before and since becoming a politician, Trump has explicitly stated that he does not think it is always a good strategy to be predictable. And while markets love predictability, sometimes markets, and the systems propping them up, need disruption. This is such a moment. Nobody should deny that the anxiety is genuine. An older friend of mine, well into his 70s, still working but ready to retire, is wondering how he and his wife will survive if their savings are wiped out. That’s true for all of us, but it begs the question: What if the painful restructuring we may be about to endure, and which may last for many years, is necessary to avoid an even worse fate? Trump’s abrupt escalation of import tariffs goes well beyond violating the principles of comparative advantage, but we can start there.

“Comparative advantage” is not all it’s cracked up to be. Repeated in business schools as if it were gospel since the 1980s, it goes something like this: “Wool is cheaper in Scotland, and wine is cheaper in France, so France should sell their wine to Scotland, and Scotland should sell their wool to France.” Everybody wins. Period. That’s the extent of it. That is the essence of free trade theory. In the real world, though, policies that rely on “comparative advantage” doctrine as their moral justification have gotten pretty ugly. While overall economic growth may be maximized when every nation exports products that it produces most cost-effectively, the local impacts are not always benign. Nations that produce coffee at competitive global prices, for example, end up with valuable cropland converted from food production to coffee plantations.

These coffee plantations are typically owned by multinational corporations that repatriate profits to low-tax nations elsewhere while buying off a small local elite that streamlines the regulatory environment. Meanwhile, the nation becomes dependent on imports for everything except coffee, and even the coffee ends up priced out of reach for the average citizen. Replace “coffee” with any specialty product, and all too often, the “gains of trade” translate on the ground into nations with seething, destitute populations dependent on accumulating debt and foreign aid. These examples aren’t restricted to foreign nations, nor are they restricted to commodities. While American multinationals moved manufacturing overseas, in the process destroying millions of jobs and thousands of communities in America, it wasn’t just cheap wool, cheap wine, and dirt-cheap flat-screen TVs that were pouring into the country in exchange. We offshored our production of steel, our chip manufacturers, our pharmaceutical industry, and much more.

And even that devastation was tolerated for decades because its effects were mostly felt in what we now call rust belt states. Our service economy and tech sectors boomed, along with what was left of manufacturing, satiating a majority of the population that loved buying cheaper foreign imports. But this whole scheme could never go on forever. America’s trade deficit in 2024 was up to $918 billion, a new record. America’s cumulative trade deficit, nearly all of it incurred since 2000, is now estimated in excess of $17 trillion.

To balance the trade deficit, there is what economists call the “current account.” If dollars flow overseas for us to purchase foreign imports in excess of foreign nations spending dollars to purchase our exports, the surplus dollars are repatriated in the form of foreigners bidding up the prices for assets they purchase in America. A slight oversimplification would be that trade deficits equate to cheap flat screens and unaffordable homes. But there is another reason America has huge trade deficits. It floods the world with dollar-denominated transactions, and by permitting foreigners to buy American assets, we effectively collateralize our currency. And so long as America is for sale in this manner, that helps sustain the dollar as a hard currency.

That comes in handy. For 46 out of the last 50 years, Americans have logged federal budget deficits. So far, the dollar’s status as the dominant transaction and reserve currency of the world gives America’s federal government the ability to borrow money by selling Treasury Notes. This is all well known and rehashed beyond the need to elaborate further. So, why are people acting like this was sustainable? How long can the global economic model rest on American trade deficits funding the military and industrial development of nations that, in some cases, aren’t even allies, with all of it balanced through foreign purchases of American assets? And how long will international demand for dollars finance federal budget deficits? To understand why this had to come to a head, consider federal budget trends in recent years.

In 2019, the last year of Trump’s first term, the federal budget was $4.4 trillion, with interest payments of $400 billion. For 2025, the first year of Trump’s current term, the projected federal budget is $7.0 trillion, with interest of just under $1.0 trillion. What changed? While the COVID pandemic was used to justify massive infusions of stimulative federal cash into the economy, much of it probably necessary, why hasn’t spending been reduced since the pandemic’s impact has been over for at least two years? Are we supposed to just expect massive federal budget deficits year after year? Is it sustainable to log a federal budget deficit that has grown from an alarming $900 billion in 2019 to $1.9 trillion in 2025, more than twice as much?

A roughly accurate summary of the economic reality we confront is federal budget deficits of $2 trillion per year and trade deficits of $1 trillion per year. Trade deficits translate into growing foreign ownership of American assets. Federal budget deficits add up in the form of accumulating, interest-bearing national debt. In 2019, the interest payments on what at the time was $22 trillion in national debt had already reached $575 billion, at an average interest rate of 2.5 percent. By 2024, the national debt had skyrocketed to $35 trillion, an increase of $13 trillion in just six years. Interest payments in 2024 were $1.1 trillion, and the average interest rate had risen to 3.3 percent. “Average” interest rate requires explanation. Ten-year treasury notes currently pay 4.4 percent. Interest rates have risen over the past few years. Imagine if that continues, and $35 trillion (or more) in treasury notes mature and are reinvested at 4.4 percent. That would raise the annual federal interest payment on the national debt to $1.5 trillion. At what point does this become a crisis?

Read more …

 

 

Favorite Calvin of all time.

 

 

https://twitter.com/khnh80044/status/1911960834559148452

Holy week

 

 

Fairy

 

 

Vancouver
https://twitter.com/dom_lucre/status/1912240470480285729

 

 

Charlie
https://twitter.com/khnh80044/status/1912456564352717089

 

 

Two things
https://twitter.com/RealDonKeith/status/1912496724888690887

 

 

 

 

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Vitamin D

Sep 282020
 
 September 28, 2020  Posted by at 5:33 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , ,  14 Responses »


Rene Magritte Memory 1948

 

 

Let me have another go at the shortest essay ever here. Explain the simplest thing ever in the universe. I see the governments of Greece, UK, Holland all declare they have to “fight” the increasing COVD19 numbers in their countries with measures such as closing all bars and restaurants at 10pm. Greece wants everyone to wear a facemask even outside. Try feeding the homeless, as we actively do here, with that kind of premise.

And it’s all pretty much nonsense, as yet another study, this one from Boston University, points out. You can cut your COVID risk by more than half, if you tell your people to take enough Vitamin D. That’s it. Not masks, but a supplement, No big conspiracies, no big anything. Vitamin D. 10,000 daily for the first week, 5,000 after that. Not much else matters. You sort of found your vaccine before it appeared.

For some obscure reason, your government doesn’t want you to know this. I can’t really figure out why. But I will tell all my friends here, and those that read me from other places. How could I do anything else? We’re literally saving lives here, but the topic, and the people, have become politicized. Shame on all of you who allowed that to happen. But make sure you take the Vitamin D. It at least cuts your risk in half.

COVID-19 Patients Who Get Enough Vitamin D Are 52% Less Likely To Die

People who get enough vitamin D are at a 52 percent lower risk of dying of COVID-19 than people who are deficient for the ‘sunshine vitamin,’ new research reveals. Vitamin D plays a crucial role in the immune system and may combat inflammation. These features may make it a key player in the body’s fight against coronavirus. Rates of vitamin D deficiency are also higher in some of the same groups who have been hardest hit by coronavirus: people of color and elderly people. It’s by no means a causal link, but suggests that vitamin D could play a role in who gets COVI-19, who gets sickest from it, and who is spared altogether.

Boston University’s Dr Michael Holick found in his previous research that people who have enough vitamin D are 54 percent less likely to catch coronavirus in the first place. Following on that work, he and his team have found that people who don’t get enough of the vitamin are far more likely to become severely ill, develop sepsis or even die after contracting coronavirus. Because vitamin D deficiency is common in people with other disease that raise coronavirus risks, it’s impossible to say exactly how many lives would be spared if we all got our daily dose of the sunshine vitamin. But we know that about 42 percent of the US population is vitamin D deficient. If that rate held true for the more 203,000 Americans who died of coronavirus, perhaps some 85,000 would have fared better with improved vitamin D levels.

In Britain 20 per cent of the population suffer from the deficiency, according to the British Nutrition Foundation. When the rate is applied to the UK’s 41,936 deaths from coronavirus, it suggests 8,387 of them could have been helped with improved levels of Vitamin D. ‘This study provides direct evidence that vitamin D sufficiency can reduce the complications, including the cytokine storm (release of too many proteins into the blood too quickly) and ultimately death from COVID-19,’ Dr Holick said. Dr Holick and his colleagues took blood samples from 235 patients admitted to hospitals in Tehran for COVID-19. Overall, 67 percent of the patients had vitamin D levels below 30 ng/mL.

There isn’t a clear marker for the ideal level of vitamin D, but 30 ng/mL is considered a sufficient. Anything below that is ‘insufficient,’ but won’t necessarily have broad-ranging health consequences, while levels below 20 ng/mL are considered ‘deficient.’ About 60 percent of elderly people living in nursing homes, for example, are thought to be vitamin D deficient. The most likely explanation is that they simply spend too much time indoors. Sunlight is our primary source of vitamin D. When we are exposed to ultraviolet (UV) radiation in rays of sunshine, it reacts with cholesterol in our skin, triggering the production of vitamin D. In an increasingly indoor world, rates of vitamin D deficiency have climbed.

 

Imagine you can cut all these disruptive measures by simply supplying your people with Vitamin D. Nah, that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? Sure there must be a more complicated path. Add some zinc. It prevents the virus from replicating. We’ve been saying this since February. We think it’s nuts that people haven’t latched on.

 

 

 

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Automatic Earth (Not) In Athens

May 312020
 
 May 31, 2020  Posted by at 2:04 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  9 Responses »


Monastiraki Square deserted due to lockdown, Athens, Greece 2020

 

Well, actually, there is no Automatic Earth in Athens right now. But we’re working on it. And I have had a hard time finishing articles recently for some reason. It may be because it’s virustime, and it’s certainly because of the lockdown. People are social animals, and I am no exception. Living alone and working alone makes it more extreme.

Not that I have changed my mind on lockdowns; they are the only option to tame the virus under the circumstances. Still, a lockdown must be executed properly, to make it “as close to impossible as possible” for the virus to jump to new hosts, and that has only been done in very few places, either because politicians and “experts” don’t understand how and why, or they find it too inconvenient. But enough about that for the moment, even as today’s new global cases top 130,000 in yet another new record.

 

In mid-December I went from Athens to Holland, where I still rent a small apartment though I’ve been spending most of my time in Athens. I thought I’d stay a few months in the Lowlands, do some of the everyday -or every year- stuff that needs doing, taxes, medical things etc., and return to Athens in spring.

I had a ticket back to Athens from Holland on April 1, which I had bought early February, when things still seemed somewhat normal. But as the date approached, of course, we moved ever further away from normal. If I had booked a few weeks earlier, things might have worked out, but Greece implemented a very strict lockdown, so it wouldn’t have been much fun.

I could change the ticket for free until two weeks before departure, after which the cost for changing it would be close to the original ticket price. So I changed it. By then, there was a two-week mandatory full quarantine in place for new arrivals in Greece. Not very tempting, but more importantly I was thinking I didn’t want to become a burden on the Greek healthcare system.

Which according to some has shrunk by 75% (imagine that) due to EU-mandated austerity. I was thinking the odds of Greece and the Greek system being overwhelmed were much higher than that it would happen in Holland. Boy, was I wrong. The irony is that it is exactly this that made Greece adopt the strict lockdown measures it did, as early as it did, and faring so much better because of it.

For 2 months, until 2 weeks ago, everyone who was out in the street had to carry a piece of paper detailing why they were out (try that in the US!). The only valid reasons to be out were shopping for food or medicine. All stores other than supermarkets and pharmacies were closed anyway. Greece was early and strict. They didn’t feel they had a choice.

And even if so much of the healthcare system has been bulldozed, the core is still very strong, that is a major factor. The professionals (experts) running the system and advising the government are of a very high caliber, which is more than one can say of many other countries.

 

 

 

 

In Holland, it’s been a very different story. It was late to the game, and when it did decide on a lockdown, it called it an “intelligent” lockdown. Like Dutch people are smarter than others. Which, of course, people like to hear. Most stores have remained open (though not public transport), there was no mass testing, only people with obvious symptoms were tested, and the Dutch version of the CDC still maintains today that face masks don’t actually work (i.e. we are more intelligent than 4.5 billion Asians).

Like in many other countries, the lack of testing and masks really only had one reason behind it, and it wasn’t that they would not work, or that anyone believed they didn’t, it was that they didn’t have any. And then when a government says they’re not needed, the pace at which they are purchased abroad or can be produced domestically slows down too, even with all the high tech industries in the country. That way you sort of boil in your own fat.

We’re 5 months into the pandemic, and only now can one get tested without already being on the verge of death [Update May 31: still no test available without symptoms, asymptomatic carriers be damned. Should I fake symptoms?]. And only now are masks obligatory in public transport. This means the virus has become pretty much embedded, though perhaps not yet endemic, in the population.

It’s a giant gamble with the lives of your citizens when you try to hide your failure to acquire the necessary tools and implement the needed procedures, behind stories about how well “we” are really doing. The kind of gamble that politicians should at the very least by forced to quit for, but that is not going to happen.

But, more irony, they’re real popular. People buy the narrative that “this is the best we could have done”, and hang on to their lips every day for a shred of good news. That happens in many countries, of course, and, yes, it has a function: if you want to do a lockdown, above all you need a sense of unity. That it is used to hide lies and failures is almost an afterthought.

I don’t try to point out to people here -the few I see- anymore that their government has done a terrible job; they all watch the same news, and they’ve all bought the same “we’re in this together” kool-aid. Which, again, does serve a purpose, but it’s also very false. Here are the latest numbers from Worldometer:


Holland:
17.3 million people,
46,257 cases of COVID19, and
5,951 deaths.


Greece:
10.7 million people,
2,915 cases and
175 deaths.

I don’t even have to do the percentages, do I? The “successful” and “intelligent” Holland not only, 5 months in, still has an “official” worse “deaths per million population” rate than the US(!), the Dutch numbers also invariably come with the official addition that “real” numbers of both cases and deaths are much higher due to the lack of testing.

Almost as if they’re proud of it. As if it’s a waste of time to try and keep track of how and where the virus is spreading in your society, something you won’t ever know if you only test and count people who are already in hospital or dead.

 

High time for a more uplifting story. In early March, as Greece lockdown measures took hold one by one, almost all of the social kitchens were quickly shut down. But not the people the Automatic Earth has been supporting for 5 years running with your kind help. “Our” crew changed strategy as cooking in the street was no longer an option, and started preparing meals in a central place, only to drive down and hand them out fully ready in the familiar places near Monastiraki square and the Piraeus port.

And because so many other social kitchens had closed and the homeless still needed to eat (always the first to bear the brunt, no exception this time), they made -and make- a lot more meals as well than they were used to doing, and worked 4 days instead of 2, preparing some 700 meals every week.

It’s not just many more meals, but every meal takes much more time and energy to prepare than usual; each has to be packaged separately, because of course fears were that the homeless would be most susceptible to the virus. In short, they’ve all been working their behinds off. Everyone talks about heroes, and these people are mine. Let me show you with a few pictures:

Here’s Monastiraki square, deserted (with the Acropolis on top of the mountain):

 

 

Some of the crew preparing meals in the central place:

 

 

And posing (that’s Tassos doing his finest Greek Zorro):

 

 

Then there’s of course -some of- Da Boyz:

 

 

The usual hot meal in the big pot:

 

 

But lots of other things too, all individually wrapped:

 

 

Which then end up in these crates before they’re loaded into cars to be distributed.

 

 

I love this picture, these are some of the things served on Greek Easter, April 19, because the homeless, too, should celebrate:

 

 

And then the packages are handed to the people in central Athens:

 

 

And at the port of Piraeus:

 

 

Greece, like other countries, is slowly easing its lockdown, first the stores opened, last week it was terraces at bars and restaurants, and next week it will be the inside of these places too.

“The Crew” is not yet back to cooking in the streets, that will take a bit more time. I’ve been keeping in close touch with them, and it’s high time to replenish the supermarket “checks” I last arranged for in December. First thing I’ll do when I get there. Been offering it all the time, a bank transfer might have worked, but so far they manage.

Air traffic is resuming as well, bit by bit. When I changed my ticket in mid-March, I had no idea what would be realistic, and picked June 16 “out of a hat”. Not a bad guess, it turns out. June 16 became 17, and 2 days ago the Greeks said Holland is a risk country, so no flights before July, but this morning they changed that again, to mandatory testing at the airport followed by a night in a designated hotel; it now looks as if this might actually happen. Then again, 17 days is an eternity in virustime of course.

And in the process I’ll get tested, something I can’t get done in Holland. I’ve been holed up in an area of Holland with very few infections, but I’ll still have to do the train-airport-plane routine to get to Athens, all places where the danger of being infected is -relatively- high. Holland is a country the size of a postage stamp, and it still today averages more new cases than Greece has had total deaths.

 

As always when I write about the Automatic Earth in Athens project, I ask you to support it. There are still a few hundred dollars left, but I want to buy at least €1000 worth of supermarket checks, so the crew can fill their by now empty pantries and cupboards and do something extra for the clients, who haven’t had an easy time.

The way it goes is simple and identical to how we’ve always done this: you can donate through our Paypal widget at the top left corner of the site. Any donations that end in $0.99 or $0.37 go straight to the crew, other amounts go to the Automatic Earth, which also badly needs support, and which you can of course also support via Patreon, see top right corner of the site.

I am honored and proud to be associated with these people, and proud of the bonds we have forged since 2015, and I think you should be too. Together, we support the most vulnerable people, homeless and refugees, in a city still overflowing with vulnerable people (with many more added because of the virus), and we do it through a crew that doesn’t cease to amaze with their selflessness.

I don’t remember if I ever mentioned this, but a few years ago I was talking to a guy who did a project on Lesbos, maybe still does, and we were saying: many years from now, when looking back on your life, what will you be most proud of? We both concluded that this would certainly among the top in the list: supporting the weakest members of society. But I can’t do it without your help, which has been amazing all this time, and which I hope will continue in the same way that I am determined to continue to support this wonderful little shimmer of light.

 

 

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It’s The Virus, Stupid

Feb 252020
 
 February 25, 2020  Posted by at 7:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Venice carnival or Black Death? Mary Poppins?

 

 

Many of the things we see happening now with the coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, take your pick, I “predicted” a while ago. But I’m not in the predicting business, and anyone who would have said even just a week ago that Italy would have 11 deaths today and/or Iran would have 50, or the US 53+ cases of infection, would have been labeled a raving lunatic.

Wuhan apparently relaxed some of their lockdown measures yesterday (and walked that back hours later), as did other places in China when they hadn’t had any new cases for 24 hours or so, and we know why they do it -it’s the economy, stupid!- but that is really the worst possible thing to do. China’s even trying to telegraph that they are in control again, as per Zero Hedge:

“As the WHO team wrapped up its Monday press conference with what was essentially tantamount to a global confidence-building exercise in China’s response, a senior official from China’s National Health Commission said the coronavirus risk from Wuhan had gone ‘way down.’ Of course, if that’s true, then why did officials cancel a planned easing of the lockdown? The official added that China has “..managed to stop the ‘rapid rise’ of infections in Wuhan, though they haven’t stopped the epidemic yet..”

Of course it’s lovely that at the very moment China – falsely- claims to be regaining control, markets worldwide sink into a deep well and gold climbs the Kilimanjaro. Surprising it is not. It simply shows that “investors” are mostly completely clueless about the virus, and the media they follow mostly don’t know dick all either or prefer not to rock the cradle.

The so-called investors follow the same behavioral pattern that civil servants, politicians, “management” at companies, and journalists do. They check first and last what others are doing, so they won’t look out of tune and they can’t be accused of crying wolf. They tend to only act when the rest do, and by then it will inevitably be too late. Man as a social animal, covering their asses by hiding behind others.

For those so-called investors, who cares what they do or why? But for politicians and civil servants, this mindset means they will NOT be ordering test-kits, medicine and the like, when they should. And not warning the public about various upcoming threats and shortages.

For journalists it means their readers and viewers are only clued in when the wolf’s right on their doorstep. I’ve used the Chinese politburo as an example in The Party and the Virus (Feb 2), but I don’t think western countries are much, if any, faster or wiser or more aware. These are all jobs replete with born followers who have only ever learned how to hide behind mom’s skirts and aprons.

And for the rare few who don’t think in herd terms, they will be ridiculed by the sheep in that herd, who will again seek strength in numbers and behind aprons when they are found wanting. Which is fine for investors, they are only playing with money. The others, though, are playing with human lives.

 

A comment on my article last week, Go Forth and Multiply (Feb 20), suggested that I merely collected the most alarmist articles and turned them into an article. Nope.

The article deals with the failures of all the groups of people mentioned above, in various countries, which have led to where we are today. There are plenty other reports which are far more “alarmist”. I am not personally talking about worst-case scenarios, but in other instances I have quoted a few scientists who would fit that description. Take for instance Gabriel Leung at Hong Kong University, whom I’ve quoted more than once. Leung and his team contend:

• Most experts thought that each person infected would go on to transmit the virus to around 2.5 other people. That gave an “attack rate” of 60-80%.
• Even if the general fatality rate is as low as 1%, which Leung thinks is possible once milder cases are taken into account, the death toll would be massive.
• “Is 60 to 80% of the world’s population going to get infected? Maybe not. Maybe this will come in waves. Maybe the virus is going to attenuate its lethality because it certainly doesn’t help it if it kills everybody in its path, because it will get killed as well..”

There’s Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, who predicts that “within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected..” And Lancaster University epidemiologist/biostatistician Jonathan Read isn’t all that much cheerier.

Compared to those guys, I am not an alarmist, nor do I go out to look for articles in that vein. I did see quite a while ago that this virus had “potential”, though. And I did see The Big Lockdown (Feb 5) coming before it did. Actually, I see a lot more of that. My intent is to go back to Athens in April, but I seriously have no idea if that will be on offer 5-6 weeks from now, as Italy already today has 11 deaths, 322 cases, and over 100,000 people under lockdown, and deployed the military. Italy had nothing a week ago. And Italy is not that far from Greece.

Come to think of it, nor is it from Holland, where I am right now. That is a situation that people should have woken up to a long time ago. Holland has a number of its citizens locked up in a hotel on Tenerife, Canary Islands, a Spanish province off the northwest coast of Africa. There are 1000 guests in the hotel, all confined to their rooms, because one guest was an Italian who tested positive for COVID19.

There’s also a hotel in Innsbruck, Tyrol, Austria on lockdown. It has an Italian receptionist who is infected. Check the quarantine time for theose people. If it’s less than two weeks, you know nobody’s learned a thing.

This is the shape of things to come. As is Italy admitting a hospital actually spread the virus. And Japan saying it will now attempt to limit virus deaths, instead of preventing them. That may sound like mere semantics, but it’s not. It sounds like Japan giving up on the 2020 Tokyo Olympics without pronouncing it.

Also in Holland, yesterday a high end webshop, which sells electronics, including iPhones, etc., said they want to sell less!! and will raise prices because they foresee they can’t get sufficient supplies from China anymore soon. The obvious media reaction is they must be crazy, because competitors haven’t done the same. But that’s too easy. Maybe they just broke free of the mold of waiting for others to act.

What I find interesting in that light is that Holland’s dependence on the global China trade is much less than for other rich nations, and for south east Asia as a whole. Whither Amazon, Walmart, whither the Silk Road? Quo Vadis?

 

 

On February 6, the day after I published The Big Lockdown , a friend at the Global Change Research Institute, reacting to my question “Will [the Chinese] have an economy left by then?” (I don’t remember the exact time I referred to), said “Isn’t that TOO pessimistic?”

My reply was: “There’ll always be something left. There was an economy 100 years ago, and 500, and 1,000. It started when Eve made a deal with a snake. My point was more: what KIND of economy will there be? Nobody seriously considers a collapse such as this, and I think they should.”

He retorted: “I am not really convinced this will be a trigger of (chinese) economic collapse, but well, I am open-minded about such possibility… For now, I am corona-triggered-collapse-skeptic. ;-)”

I wonder how he feels about it today.

Me, I don’t think the biggest issue with the virus is the number of deaths and cases, at least not in the short term. The biggest issue is that there is a virus on the loose than has proven it CAN be lethal, and for which there is no vaccine.

The biggest issue is that we are stumbling woefully unprepared into the future, and therefore our only defense is to lock each other, and ourselves, up in our homes, (and our communities and cities if we’re lucky) until we can’t, social animals that we are.

The biggest issue will not be the cases or even deaths, it will be that ever more of the things we have come to rely on far away lands for, will slowly cease to arrive on our shores. Some of it will be trinkets we never needed, but some of it will also be things without which our lives and communities can no longer function the way we’re used to.

It will be a slow process. Or will it, nothing really moves slow with this virus; it appears to move in virus time, not human time.

You should probably get some immune system boosters while they are available, like Vit.D(3) and echinacea. Facial masks perhaps, while there are any. There are professionals who are regular commenters on the Automatic Earth and who can answer questions on that.

We should also likely prepare for a large-scale reduction in large-scale activities, events that require crowds. Olympics, sports games, concerts, arenas, but also supermarkets and department stores. And then after that come public transport and factories. Alarmist again? Just wait till the first case or death comes to a town near you. Observe how people react. You can see it today in Wuhan, Beijing, Milan, Qom.

By the way, how do you know there are no cases near you? Is anyone testing? Do they have test kits? They will test soon, and they will have kits if they can find any. Note: Japan said today their supply of test kits will be used only for the most serious cases. Everyone else is on their own.

New reports of infections are coming in today from Canada, Bahrain, Croatia, Austria, Switzerland, Romania, Barcelona and more. Ask yourself: what are the odds this will stop tomorrow morning? Or that the US won’t get worse? Face masks, Vit. C, Vit.D(3), echinacea and other things won’t bankrupt most of you, and they’re good for you anyway, so maybe get them while you can.

Oh, and prepare for an enormous amount of misinformation emanating from the politicians and media who are always way behind the curve, and who right now are all actively pondering how to protect the economy. They can’t conceive of a world where a virus can trump the economy. Pun intended. Neither can those who call themselves “investors”. It’s the virus, stupid. HedgeEye got that one particulary well:

 

 

Me, I’m sitting here wondering what the link is between the masks for the -now cancelled- Venice carnival, and the Black Death. But that sounds at least a little alarmist, too, doesn’t it?

Please remind me to pick up a copy of Boccaccio’s Decameron(e), in which ten people tell ten stories each while in quarantine outside of Florence during the Plague, around 1350 AD. Should be popular soon.

 

 

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Assange and Auschwitz

Dec 072019
 
 December 7, 2019  Posted by at 7:29 pm Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  12 Responses »


Saul Leiter Taxi c1957

 

When I read that Angela Merkel visited Auschwitz this week (for the first time ever, curiously, after 14 years as Chancellor, and now it’s important?), my first thought was: she should have visited Julian Assange instead. I don’t even know why, it just popped into my head. And then reflecting on it afterwards, of course first I wondered if it’s acceptable to compare nazi victims to Assange in any way, shape or form.

There are many paths to argue it is not. He is not persecuted solely for being part of a group of people (we can’t really use “race” here). There are not millions like him who are being tortured and persecuted for the same reasons he is. There is no grand scheme to take out all like him. There is no major police or army force to execute any such scheme. These things are all obvious.

But I grew up in Holland, where unlike in Merkel’s Germany, the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust was very much present. I looked it up, and it’s already almost 10 years ago that I wrote Miep Gies Died Today, in which I explained this. Miep Gies was a woman who worked for Anne Frank’s father Otto, helped hide the family in the annex, and after the war secured Anne’s diary (or we would never have known about it) and handed it to Otto Frank.

So accusing me of anti-semitism for comparing the Holocaust to what is being done to Assange is not going to work. Why then did Merkel never visit Auschwitz before this week, and when she did, said how important it is to German history? And why did she not visit Assange instead?

Unlike the people who died in Auschwitz and other concentration camps (Anne Frank died in Bergen Belsen from typhoid), Julian Assange today, as we speak, IS being persecuted, he IS being tortured, and he IS likely to die in a prison. What does Angela Merkel think that Anne Frank would have thought about that? Would she have written in her diary that it was okay?

Would all those millions of Jewish and Roma and gay victims have thought that? There are 75+ years that have gone by. We can not get these victims back, we can not magically revive them. But we CAN make sure that what happened to them, torture and murder, doesn’t happen to people today. “Never Again”, right? Well, it IS happening again.

Are we all supposed to go say “I didn’t know” -“Ich hab es nicht gewüsst”- like the Germans did, and all those who collaborated with them across Europe?

There are victims who are dead, and there are victims who are -barely- alive. And if you claim you wish to honor the dead victims, you must ask what they would have felt about the ones like them who are still alive. Otherwise, you’re not honoring them, you’re just posing and acting and, in the end, grossly insulting them.

Julian Assange is not in a German prison, true, but Angela Merkel is still the uncrowned queen of Europe, and if she would visit Julian in his Belmarsh torture chamber it would make a huge difference. That she elects to visit Auschwitz instead, does not only make her appear hollow and empty, it is a grave insult to the likes of Anne Frank and all the other nazi victims.

 

 

Which brings me to another Assange-related issue. The Guardian’s editor, Katharine Viner, launched an appeal yesterday for people to donate money to her paper’s “climate emergency” fund. That in itself is fine. If people think they need to help save the planet with their savings, sure.

Though I will always have suspicions about all these things. From where I stand, I see too many people claiming to save the planet, oil CEOs and billionaires first, and too much money being invited to join their funds. If you want to donate something for the cause, why do it via a newspaper? But even with that in mind, yeah, whatever, it’s Christmas time. Who cares how effective the money will be?

My problem with Katharine Viner and the Guardian is that they have played a very active role in the smearing and persecution of Julian Assange. They’ve published articles that were proven to be 100% false, and never retracted them, or apologized, or attempted to make things right. The Guardian is a major reason why Julian is where he is. It has accommodated, make that encouraged, the British people’s “Ich hab es nicht gewüsst”.

You can donate to the Guardian’s climate emergency fund, if you believe they don’t run it to make you think they really care about the planet more than about their bottom line, but be careful: you will also be supporting the further smearing and persecution of Julian Assange. Are you sure you want to do that?

See, the headline for Katharine Viner’s article is: The Climate Crisis Is The Most Urgent Threat Of Our Time. And it’s not. The most urgent threat is that to Julian Assange’s health. That is today, not in 5 or 10 or 100 years. After all, what is the use of saving the planet if we allow the smartest and bravest among us to be tortured to death? What do we think Anne Frank would have said about that?

 

 

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Assange, Nitrogen, Pensions, Solomon

Nov 192019
 
 November 19, 2019  Posted by at 7:09 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  18 Responses »


Paul Gauguin Road in Tahiti 1891

 

I’m getting pissed off about multiple things right now, too many to make them all separate essays. Let’s give it a combined shot:

In Holland, the talk of the town is nitrogen emissions. I’d never seen it raised as that kind of problem, but there you go. The government last week decided to lower the max speed limit on highways to 100km (66miles) , from 120-130. Their reasoning was that this would allow the building industry to build more -by now hugely overpriced- homes and apartments.

Oh, but agriculture (aka cattle) is responsible for 46% of nitrogen emissions. So they have a plan to alter cattle feed (I am still serious here). I understand that neighbors Germany and Belgium have had nitrogen policies in place for years, so their cars can keep on pedaling to the metal because they don’t have a problem. Huh?

 

Also in Holland, big discussions about cuts to pensions. Which of course leads to big protests, which in turn makes the government make sure that cuts this year will be minimal. Okay, but how about next year? No comment. Holland is supposed to have one of the best pension systems on the planet, but they don’t get to escape the BIG erosion either.

Aging population, fewer contributors, lower wages, it’s happening everywhere. Our pension systems are Ponzi schemes. Every single penny you give a pensioner today is taken away from one tomorrow. The entire system is broke, we just don’t want to face that simple fact.

15 years ago, pensions systems were required by law to hold only AAA-denominated assets. Look at that today. They all have 7-8% in their prospectus, and bonds pay 1%, if that. Unless you gamble. So they have all moved into equities, which look fine because central banks prop them up, but the model itself has changed like Jekyll becames Hyde.

 

Then, Sweden decided to drop the 2010 rape charges against Assange 9 years later. In reality, there never WERE any rape charges. But still, prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson re-opened the “investigation” in May 2019. Just so Julian could be dragged from the Ecuador embassy in London on a seemingly legit charge. Eva-Marie Persson should be in Belmarsh prison, not Julian. But she represents the law, and he does not. He has exposed its dim-witted lackeys. My comment earlier today at the Automatic Earth:

“Sweden has dropped its rape inquiry into Julian Assange. Good f%@$#ing Lord, what year is it? The f%@$#ing job is f%@$#ing done, isn’t, you f%@$#ers? How can you be a Swede and not protest this? What kind of people live in that country? No, I know, the same kind as live in the UK and US. Ignorant f%@$#s.”

Oh, and now they’re arresting Epstein’s prison guards? Come on guys, you got to recognize a joke as a joke.

 

Then a CNN piece about John Solomon, who was thrown out of the Hill recently though he was their best reporter. Now, he was already fired from the Hill despite being their ace reporter, but that’s not enough for CNN, they want the owner too. So for CNN, it’s a direct link from Trump to Giuliani to Solomon to Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein:

Jimmy Finkelstein, The Owner Of The Hill, Has Flown Under The Radar

James “Jimmy” Finkelstein, the owner of The Hill newspaper, is not a widely known media executive, but he is one of the era’s most consequential. Finkelstein resides at the nexus of President Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and John Solomon, the now-former executive at The Hill and current Fox News contributor who pushed conspiracy theories about Ukraine into the public conversation. While Solomon has received significant media attention for his work at The Hill, Finkelstein has stayed out of the headlines, despite having himself played a crucial role in the saga.

One, Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, said of one of Solomon’s stories, “I think all the key elements were false.” Pressed further on the matter by Rep. Lee Zeldin, a New York Republican, Vindman said, “I haven’t looked at the article in quite some time, but you know, his grammar might have been right.” [..] After CNN Business reached out to a representative for The Hill for comment, The Hill Editor-In-Chief Bob Cusack announced in a Monday morning email to staffers that Solomon’s work was under review.

“As you are aware, John Solomon left The Hill earlier in the fall, but in light of recent congressional testimony and related events, we wanted to apprise you of the steps we are taking regarding John Solomon’s opinion columns which were referenced in the impeachment inquiry,” Cusack wrote. “Because of our dedication to accurate non-partisan reporting and standards, we are reviewing, updating, annotating with any denials of witnesses, and when appropriate, correcting any opinion pieces referenced during the ongoing congressional inquiry,” Cusack added.

Now, I have followed, and quoted, Solomon for quite some time, and I think he’s thorough, well documented, and in short what a journalist should be (nothing to do with opinion). Calling him conspirational is really quite a jump. But this is CNN. They do conspiracy like no-one else. And apparently they got what they wanted, because the Hill now is this:

Trump’s Ukraine Scandal Rooted In Fear Of Biden

Why is President Trump so nervous about the 2020 race? He has a record amount of campaign cash. Russian bots are still working for him. And he still has the backing of more than 80 percent of his party. So, how do I know he’s so nervous? As Trump loves to say: Read the transcript. At the heart of the phone call that has led to impeachment hearings is Trump going out on a shaky limb to ask Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for a “favor.” That “favor” included a request for Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and Biden’s son, Hunter. The only reason for Trump to risk asking a foreign leader for help getting political dirt on an opponent is that he feared that rival’s power.

Me personally, I’ll stick with John Solomon for now. I haven’t caught him on a lie, and not on propaganda. Which is much better than I can say about just about every other outlet out there. Yeah, Hannity is a very loose cannon, Tucker Carlson not that much, but it’s the CNN people, and Rachel Maddow, that are far worse when it comes to propaganda.

And Adam Schiff too, who gets to conduct his fake trial in which he doesn’t have to say a single true word because he’s not under oath and the “witnesses” can be 2nd-3rd-4th hearsay ones. Anyone can say anything as long as it is negative for Trump. You know, that guy the American people elected as their president 3 years ago. Let’s move this into a courtroom -like the Senate- and do away with the absurd theater.

 

 

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MH17: Compromised From The Start

Jun 202019
 
 June 20, 2019  Posted by at 6:42 pm Finance, Primers Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Caravaggio I musici 1595-96

 

The investigation into the crash of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane in East Ukraine was always compromised, right from the start. The crash on July 17 2014 came shortly after the “Euromaidan revolution” in Kiev – which first began in November 2013 and culminated in the ousting of elected president Yanukovich on 23 February 2014, happily helped along by John McCain, Victoria Nuland and then-US ambassador to Ukraine (now ambassador to Greece) Geoffrey Pyatt for the USA, as well as various EU actors.

Russia reacted by “annexing” Crimea – a large majority of whose people had voted for Yanukovich, thereby safeguarding its access to its only warm water port. Not a shot was fired there, but it was very different in East Ukraine (Donbass), where people -of Russian origin- also didn’t want to be subjected to a new regime under Nuland’s puppet Yatsenyuk -and later Poroshenko. They started a civil war which continues to this day.

It was in that heated political climate that the MH17 came down, killing all its 298 passengers, 196 of whom had the Dutch nationality. 3 weeks later, on August 8, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was formed, which was to be led by Holland, and to also include representatives from Australia, Belgium and Ukraine. Which is odd, since at that time, Ukraine certainly was a potential perpetrator of the downing.

Malaysia joined only in December, allegedly because only then did it finally agree to allow Ukraine, a nation that was a suspect, a veto over any conclusions that the team would publish. Malaysia had already been handed the black boxes by pro-Russian rebels in the area, and passed them on to the team in August. Summarized, the way the JIT was formed was highly curious. The countries even signed a secret agreement.

 

Immediately after the crash, people like then-US VP Joe Biden, as well as Frans Timmermans, then-Dutch Foreign Minister and today candidate for the EU top job, pointed the finger at Russia as the party responsible for shooting down the plane. Also curious, since there had been no investigation and the plane crashed in a civil war zone where access was almost impossible. There was talk at the time of the US having satellite images, but none have ever been produced.

In that atmosphere, the JIT yesterday, June 19 2019, held another press conference, in which it accused four men, three from Russia and one from Ukraine, of being “involved” in shooting down the plane. But again, almost 5 years after the incident, the team produced no evidence for its accusations, saying it will only be presented 9 months from now when a trial will start in the Netherlands.

It also again accused Russia of refusing to cooperate, though Russia has offered its help ever since the MH17 came down. It’s just not the help the people want who have accused the Russians since before there was any hint of evidence it was involved. And there still is no evidence. Russia has filed long and detailed reports on the incident despite being ignored, but these reports have been … ignored.

 

The trial will take place starting March 9 2020 without the accused, since Russia doesn’t extradite its citizens, and neither does Ukraine. Moreover, the one Ukrainian who is accused is thought to be in the Donbass, where the government has no access.

So this will be a show trial. And one must wonder why it is staged. What’s the use of a trial where defendants don’t defend themselves? Sure, the official line is they would love to have the men provide a defense, but that smells a bit too much like what has happened to Julian Assange. What are the odds of a fair trial when so many conclusions have been drawn at such early times?

There is not a soul in Europe west of the Russian border who doesn’t believe the Russians did it. The media take care of that. Nor is there in the US. But the Malaysian PM himself yesterday, again, said the team has proven nothing, and only provided hearsay. I kid you not, I read a piece on the BBC today that asked if the 93-year-old who lost 43 of his countrymen only said that because he wanted to sell palm oil to Russia.

And in the meantime, the evidence is not there, and won’t be for another 9 months, if ever, and the EU today added another year to its Russia sanctions over Crimea, and 4 men can deny their involvement all they want, but they can make their case only in March 2020, and only at a show trial, with international search warrants hanging over their heads.

 

The four men in question, by the way, are not accused of firing the BUK missile that supposedly downed the MH17. They are only accused of facilitating the transport of the missile and launcher from Russia to Ukraine -and back. The JIT Ukrainian team bases the entire story of that transport on serial numbers it says it has found.

On September 17 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense in a YouTube response to a May 24 2018 JIT exhibition, said it had tracked down those serial numbers, 8868720, and 1318869032, and 9M38, and said both the launcher and missile corresponding to the numbers were purchased by Ukraine from Russia as far back as 1986, transferred there, and had never left the country since.

I get that information from a lengthy, deep-digging and highly recommended essay by Eric Zuesse, from December 2018, MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine’s Guilt Now Proven, which I’ve been reading the past few days, in which Eric says: “…if the JIT’s supplied evidence is authentic — which the Ukrainian team asserts it to be — then it outright convicts Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side.”

Zuesse also details, in that article, contentions from multiple sources that, while the MH17 may have been hit with a BUK missile, it certainly wasn’t the only thing that hit it. There was at least one fighter jet seen close to the plane before it came down, as multiple eye-witness reports claim, and it is alleged that they fired on the cockpit for sure and perhaps other parts of the plane. It is an excellent article that is very well researched and chock-full of links to prove its points.

 

There are many things wrong with the MH17 investigation. Having the PM of one of your member investigative countries complain that after 5 years you produce only hearsay and no evidence may be the least of the worries. The Netherlands, as main victim, leading the investigation, is strange. How neutral could they be? Their Foreign Minister blamed Russia way before any investigating was done. And Holland was a main sponsor in the “Euromaidan revolution”, i.e. the ousting of an elected president.

Still, Ukraine’s position in all this must be the biggest warning sign. They stood a lot to gain from committing atrocities and then blaming Russia for them. Plus, Yatsenyuk and Nuland and the US and the EU were mightily angry that Russia had outsmarted them all over Crimea.

But instead of keeping Ukraine out of the investigation, they became a major contributor, and were even given veto rights on anything that came out of it, as far as we know the only party with such rights. If you present a crime novel or movie with ingredients like that, nobody would believe you. Such things don’t happen in real life.

 

 

 

 

The Lies and the Narrative

Feb 132018
 
 February 13, 2018  Posted by at 3:46 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Frank Larson Chrysler reflection, 42nd Street near 5th Ave, New York 1950s

 

Update: Dutch Foreign Minister Halbe Zijlstra resigned at 5pm local time, before the parliamentary debate could take place. But that still leaves Rutte in place with his own version of “when it gets serious, you have to lie”.

 

 

There will be a parliamentary debate in Holland (the Netherlands) today about abject lies about Russia and Vladimir Putin that its Foreign Minister, Halbe Zijlstra, has been telling the country for a few years now. Zijlstra is supposed to fly to Russia tomorrow to meet with his Russian peer, Sergey Lavrov. One would suppose Zijlstra will be fired later today, if only to prevent such a meeting from taking place, but that is by no means a given.

Here’s what happened: in 2006, there was a ‘conference’ in Putin’s dacha outside of Moscow. Zijlstra worked for Shell at the time at a lower level. Later, he has pretended he way present at a meeting with Putin in which the latter supposedly talked about his dreams for a ‘Greater Russia’.

Now, Zijlstra has revealed he was not at that meeting. He claimed ‘a source’ was there and told him about it, and he had wanted to protect the source and therefore pretended he himself was present. That source, then-Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer, not only never asked for any such protection, he also sent an email to paper De Volkskrant saying that Zijlstra had ‘misinterpreted’ the story Van der Veer had told him (a diplomatic word for he lied).

Putin never talked about ambitions for a Greater Russia, and never said Kazachstan was ‘nice to have’. Zijlstra made that all up. There had been mention of Greater Russia, but in a nostalgic, historical manner. And now Van der Veer, undoubtedly much to his chagrin, gets dragged into this entire false tale.

Because the entire Dutch government, longtime Prime Minister Mark Rutte first and most of all, has said Zijlstra’s lies were somehow acceptable because the ‘inhoud’ (tenor, content, narrative) of his story was true. That is to say, Rutte claims that Putin does indeed dream of land-grabbing, of invading Ukraine, the Baltic States etc.

 

It doesn’t matter if you have no proof of something (see the painfully botched MH17 investigation), and neither does it matter if you just make the whole thing up. The only thing that matters in Holland is that you stick to the narrative. Which, there is no other way to look at it, is fully unproven and entirely made up.

This makes the government of Holland (a NATO member), and certainly Rutte, a danger to world peace. Therefore, Rutte has to go along with Zijlstra. Because he not only condones the latter’s lies and fantasies, maintained in his days as Foreign Minister, Rutte himself also makes claim after claim based on no proof at all. Or at least nothing he has ever revealed.

Holland should never have chaired the MH17 investigation, because it was its main victim (2/3 of the near 300 who died in the plane crash had Dutch passports). In the 3,5 years since the tragedy, not an ounce of evidence has ever been published by the investigators that proves Russia was the culprit. But claims to that end have been freely made over the entire period.

Fro his Putin-bashing, then-Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans got himself a cushy job as second to EU head Jean-Claude Juncker (and yes, Juncker’s “when it gets serious, you have to lie” comes to mind in the Zijlstra thing). Timmermans, like then-US Secretary of State Joe Biden, wasted no time in fingering Russia as the perpetrator. They both made this claim within minutes. Again, without any proof.

 

None of this is a specific Dutch issue. The western world, led by the US, has created an atmosphere and a narrative in which it’s deemed acceptable to lie about Russia, about Vladimir Putin, about Russian hackers, and about connections Americans and western Europeans who don’t abide by the narrative, have to Russia and everything connected with it.

And well, they are right in one sense: there is a pattern here. The Russiagate investigations in the US into ties of Trump associates with Russians, like the Dutch investigation into MH17, continue ad infinitum without producing a sliver of proof.

Various and multiple claims pertaining to alleged Russian actions in Crimea, Ukraine, Syria etc. have come up hollow. Indeed, what actions Russia has undertaken are largely in response to American and EU ‘provocation’.

And yes, all this plays out against the backdrop of the military-industrial complex that hides behind the identity of NATO, an organization without a reason to exist even since the Berlin wall came down (the wall has now been gone longer than it ever existed). NATO is a convenient entity for the entirety of the western arms industry, and the neocons that still hold sway in various of its member-nations, to publicize its fear-mongering anti-Russia messages from.

Those messages keep being duly publicized by mainstream media. The Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement today in which it said “bilateral relations with Holland are being overshadowed by an unparalleled anti-Russia campaign in Dutch media.”

“Holland accuses Russia of spreading disinformation (fake news). People in the Dutch government keep on making such unfunded claims.” Dutch media readily and uncritically disperse the idea that Russian authorities are obsessed with the creation of a Great Russia. How is that not an example of fake news?”

 

Holland would be crazy to let Zijlstra go to Moscow tomorrow to talk to Lavrov. But, given what has already been said, one can only conclude that the country is indeed crazy. Or at the very least its government is. Still, even if parliament today decides that Zijlstra must leave his post, chances that they’ll send Rutte packing as well are zero.

Even though as prime minster he’s publicly stated that his Foreign Minister telling outright lies about another country is no problem as long as he stays with the narrative that said country is a threat, a narrative for which apparently no evidence must ever be presented.

At the next EU meeting Rutte is more likely to be hailed for his stance, because the narrative is that of the entire EU, of Brussels, Berlin and Paris. And NATO.

Will this episode wake up the Dutch people? Fat chance. They will focus on Zijlstra, and probably clamor for him to leave, and then go about their daily job of feeding their readers and watchers their, as Moscow puts it, “unparralleled anti-Russia campaign.”

People like Rutte and Merkel do a very good job of showing us that Europeans have more to fear from their own governments than they do of Putin. But nobody is listening. Because their media have become as much of an echo chamber as the US MSM.

Still, make no mistake: what Rutte tells his people is that he cannot be trusted. That there are things more important than the truth: the narrative. This means they will never again be able to trust him to tell them the truth. He just said so himself.

 

 

Debt Rattle Ides of March 2017

Mar 152017
 
 March 15, 2017  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle Ides of March 2017


Russell Lee Proprietor of small store in market square, Waco, Texas 1939

 

• MSNBC’s Non-Story: Trump Made $150 Million, Paid 25% Tax Rate (ZH)
• The Most Important Chart To See Before The Dutch Election (Ed Harrison)
• Fragmentation Is the Solution, Not the Problem (CHS)
• Economists Are Political Actors (Sapir)
• One Chart That Captures the Debate Over Quantitative Easing (BBG)
• Fed Expected To Raise Rates As US Economy Flexes Muscle (R.)
• Britain Is Politically Dead From The Neck Down (Monbiot)
• Turkish Paradoxes (K.)
• World’s Spiders Eat More “Meat” Than All Of Mankind (G.)
• Monsanto Accused of Ghostwriting Papers on Roundup Cancer Risk (BBG)
• Monsanto Colluded With EPA, Could Not Prove Roundup Doesn’t Cause Cancer (ZH)
• Greece: A Year of Suffering for Asylum Seekers (HRW)
• As Greek Crisis Grinds On, Children Pay Price (K.)

 

 

Boomerang.

• MSNBC’s Non-Story: Trump Made $150 Million, Paid 25% Tax Rate (ZH)

While Rachel Maddow drones on with the coherence of Janet Yellen, losing thousands of viewers by the minute, the MSNBC anchor was promptly scooped not only by the White House which revealed her “secret” one hour in advance, but also by the Daily Beast which reported that its contributor David Cay Johnston had obtained the first two pages of Trump’s 2005 federal income tax return, allegedly receiving them in the mail, and posted his “analysts” on his website, DCReport.org. According to the documents, Trump and his wife Melania paid $38 million in total income tax, consisting of $5.3 million in regular federal income tax, and an additional $31 million of “alternative minimum tax,” or AMT.

The White House statement confirmed the finding: “Before being elected President, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world with a responsibility to his company, his family and his employees to pay no more tax than legally required,” the White House said in a statement. “That being said, Mr. Trump paid $38 million dollars even after taking into account large scale depreciation for construction, on an income of more than $150 million dollars, as well as paying tens of millions of dollars in other taxes such as sales and excise taxes and employment taxes and this illegally published return proves just that.” As the Beast notes, 2005 was the year that Trump, then a newly minted reality star, made his last big score as a real-life real estate developer, when he sold two properties, one on Manhattan’s west side and one in San Francisco, to Hong Kong investors, accounting for the lion’s share of his income that year.

“It is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns,” the White House statement concluded. “The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the President will focus on his, which includes tax reform that will benefit all Americans.” But the real story here is that there is no story: what MSNBC confirmed is that Trump made more money than some of his critics said he made in the period in question, and more importantly, that he paid a generous effective income tax rate, well above the 14.1% rate paid by Mitt Romney, and even higher than the 13.5% federal tax rate paid by Bernie Sanders in 2014.

Read more …

Three articles in a row that deal with decentralization, each from their own angle. Most important chart I don’t know, but a good indicator of the entire west moving away from traditional parties. The majority of votes may go to new parties, not established ones.

• The Most Important Chart To See Before The Dutch Election (Ed Harrison)

The present Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, is the first Prime Minister from a party other than the two traditional centrist parties, the PvdA and the CDA, and their predecessor parties since the Dutch constitution and voting system was fundamentally changed in 1917. Clearly, we are seeing a change in voting patterns. But what is even more remarkable is that right now poling for parties that have always been in opposition is almost half of the vote for this election. Why it matters: We are in the midst of an economic upswing in Europe and globally as well. By all macro accounts, the Dutch economy is performing well. Yet, between them, previous ruling coalition parties —the VVD, PvdA, CDA, D66 and CU — are projected to only get 52% of the vote.


Source: Legatum Institute

They could even get fewer votes than the parties that have never been in government during the 100 years of the modern Dutch electoral system. People talk about voters turning to populists. But what happens to electoral patterns in a recession — or another sovereign debt crisis? And how would more populist platforms or parties in Europe deal with the existing economic orthodoxy, dominated by the stability and growth pact’s 3 and 60% deficit-debt hurdles? The next coalition in the Netherlands could be unstable, as it is likely to be cobbled together to exclude the PVV. Overall, the political risks in Europe may be high right now, but depending on how the economy does, the risks can rise further still.

Read more …

As I’ve addressed many times. Centralization is in the past.

• Fragmentation Is the Solution, Not the Problem (CHS)

The fragmentation of political consensus (i.e. the consent of the citizenry) is presented by the Powers That Be and their media servants as being a disaster. The implicit fear is real enough: how can we rule the entire nation-empire if it fragments?\ As I noted the other day, fragmentation terrifies the Establishment of racketeers and insiders, for when the centrally-enforced rentier skims and scams collapse, those who own and control the rentier skims, scams and rackets will lose the source of their wealth and power. To understand why fragmentation is the solution rather than the problem, we have to look at how power is leveraged in centralized government. Let’s take the recent increase in a common pinworm treatment from $3 to $600: Pinworm prescription jumps from $3 to up to $600 a pill (via J.F.).

In a top-down, centralized hierarchy of political power (i.e. the central state), the pharmaceutical company only needs to lobby a few authorities in the central state to impose its rentier skim/scam on the entire nation. Lobbying/bribing a relative handful of federal officials and elected representatives is remarkably inexpensive: a financier or corporation only needs to focus on these few key players, and smoothing the PR pathway via a highly concentrated corporate media. A mere $5 million spent in the right places guarantees $100 million in future profits– profits earned not from open competition in a transparent market, but profits plundered as rentier skims: the product didn’t get any better or effective when the price leaped from $3 to $600, and competition was squelched by regulatory capture and high barriers to entry.

Now imagine if the pharmaceutical company had to lobby/bribe officials in each of America’s 3,142 counties to impose its rapacious rentier skim on the populace of each county. The lobbying/bribing effort will be orders of magnitude more costly and complex, and the national corporate media is less effective at the local level, where community groups and local media have some influence. If we look at the source of the 2008 Global Financial Meltdown, we find that the centralization of capital and power were the primary enablers of the meltdown. If the financial system were composed of 1,200 local banks, each of which had to comply with local and state regulations instead of five behemoth banks that had the capital and klout to buy Washington D.C.’s approval of their leverage and shady dealings, some hundreds of the smaller banks might have failed–but the system would have survived.

Read more …

Sapir is interesting. But economics is still not a science. Also addresses decentralization.

• Economists Are Political Actors – Sapir (AHT)

[..] economists have appropriated a power that is not theirs. They have indeed penetrated the inner workings of the ruling apparatus. This is true at the State level, as to that of major international organizations, whether it is in the European Union, the OECD or the WTO. They are thus increasingly inclined to intervene on all social and political problems. But when they occur, it is by mixing an experts position and a position of political actors. This poses an immediate problem. For, if the expert is legitimate to speak on behalf of an acquaintance, the political actor must comply with the rule of democratic debate. By having it both ways, economists are exonerated from the problem of verification. The problem, therefore, is to know in which space one speaks, in that of pure competence or in that of political choices. If it is in the latter, it is no longer possible to accept that the “expertise” alone can decide the debate, expertise which can no longer be verified because any judgment would combine elements of competence and political values.

If one is in the political space, then the question of legitimacy arises. Now, this question immediately refers to the higher-level issue of sovereignty. In the space of politics, one asks first who is legitimate, and who is sovereign. But there is a problem that is deeper. The scientific credibility they claim to be is far from being indisputable, or undisputed. There are very serious reasons for this, which I explained in a book dating back to the early 2000s [1]. The very way in which the majority of the profession, the economists of the mainstream, understands the object of its work, is today debated and strongly criticized [2]. The methods used by these economists, the models on which they are based, are openly contested. [..] In fact, economists do politics, what nobody ever thinks to reproach them for, but they do politics by pretending not to do so, and by delegitimizing in advance any critical discourse. This is, of course, a serious attack on democracy.

[..] It is wrong here to speak of “Europe” as if it were an institution or a federation. The only reality of Europe is a historical reality, diverse, and above all a cultural reality. If you go to Vladivostok in Russia, you are in a European city. What is now a problem for democracy is the existence of the European Union, which is an institution and of which we can follow the evolution from the origin, that is to say the Maastricht Treaty. Indeed, the evolution of the European Union since 2007-2009 is a real problem. There, yes, unquestionably, we are in the presence of a structure that tends to develop itself without control or responsibility. The statements of Jean-Claude Juncker in the Greek election of January 2015 testify it [37].

The behavior of the EU and the institutions of the Euro zone call for an overall reaction because these institutions contest this freedom that is sovereignty [38]. Let us remind here the quotation from Mr. Jean-Claude Juncker, the successor of the ineffable Barroso at the head of the European Commission: “There can be no democratic choice against European treaties”. This revealing statement dates from the Greek election of January 25, 2015, which precisely saw the victory of SYRIZA. In a few words, everything is said. It is the quiet and satisfied affirmation of the superiority of non-elected institutions over the voting of voters, of the superiority of the technocratic principle over the democratic principle.

Read more …

The mother of all asset bubbles.

• One Chart That Captures the Debate Over Quantitative Easing

Not all price increases are created equal. Goldman Sachs raises questions about the success of the efforts by the Federal Reserve and its peers to spark inflation in the wider economy with a chart showing what’s happened with prices in the largest developed economies since the start of 2009. A replication of their analysis shows a big spread in gains. While wages would never show swings on par with the likes of high-yield bonds, the chart does illustrate how well financial markets recovered from the 2007 to 2009 meltdowns. By contrast, consumer price inflation, incomes and other such gauges of the “real” economy have put in muted performances. For politicians, the chart sums up the frustrations that have helped propel the populism that Brexiteers and Donald Trump rode to victory.

Few would question that the real economy would have been in much worse shape without the Fed, ECB and Bank of Japan’s determination to avert a financial-industry meltdown last decade, an effort that saw their balance sheets balloon by trillions of dollars. [..] Economic growth and wage increases have disappointed in recent years, depressed by poor productivity gains and historically low labor-force participation – dynamics that lie outside the purview of central banks. Now that monetary policy makers are leaving the onus on governments to address growth, and contemplating the easing off of stimulus, the big question for investors is how resilient markets will be. For now, optimism prevails – everything from corporate-bond premiums to emerging-market bonds are flashing confidence. It’s perhaps no wonder: though the Fed has ended its QE, continuing programs at the ECB and BOJ are driving almost $200 billion of purchases a month, according to Deutsche Bank estimates.

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Yawn…

• Fed Expected To Raise Rates As US Economy Flexes Muscle (R.)

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates for the second time in three months on Wednesday, encouraged by strong monthly job gains and confidence that inflation is finally rising to its target. A rate hike at the conclusion of the Fed’s latest two-day policy meeting is already baked into bond yields and financial markets overall, with investors putting the likelihood of such a move at 95%, according to CME Group’s FedWatch program. Attention is turning instead to whether the U.S. central bank will signal an even faster pace of monetary tightening this year than the current three rate hikes that it projected at the December policy meeting.

“Expectations have some catching up to do regarding the Fed’s need to ‘lean into the wind’ of rising inflation, strong growth, robust sentiment, easy financial conditions, and the likelihood of fiscal stimulus in 2018,” analysts from Goldman Sachs wrote ahead of the meeting. They said they regarded a fourth rate increase this year as a “close call.” A rate increase on Wednesday would push the Fed’s target overnight lending rate to a range of between 0.75% and 1.00%, still low but approaching the range that the central bank has typically operated within. The Fed is scheduled to release its latest policy statement along with updated economic forecasts at 2 p.m. EDT. Fed Chair Janet Yellen is due to hold a press conference half an hour later.

Read more …

“Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?”

• Britain Is Politically Dead From The Neck Down (Monbiot)

Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it? It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin. But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal.

If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result. On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.

In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain. In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.

Read more …

“And the last of the paradoxes is that Turkish electoral law prohibits pre-election rallies abroad..”

• Turkish Paradoxes (K.)

What Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to accomplish is perfectly clear: He wants to win the April 16 referendum on constitutional reform and thus gain the enhanced powers his ambitious nature so covets, some of which he already enjoys after turning last summer’s failed coup into an opportunity. His strategy is also clear: criminalizing any opposition, be it in actions or mere words, mainly at the expense of journalists and the Kurds, as well as condemning in summary fashion anyone perceived as being pro-Gulen. The second part of his strategy involves exporting his edginess and bullying rhetoric, first and foremost to the Aegean at the expense of Greece, and then to the European Union in a bid to win favor among Gray Wolves voters.

The Turkish president is also trying to strong-arm Western Europe into recognizing his prerogative (and that of his subordinates, though only those who vote his way next month) to a right that he himself openly scorns and denies his opponents. History is full of such paradoxes. Another is that while Erdogan accuses the West of Islamophobia, he is doing everything in his power to strengthen this sentiment because it will benefit him at the polls, as for years he has been cultivating the myth that he is the leader of all of Islam, both in the East and the West. In contrast to Erdogan, what the EU is trying to achieve vis-a-vis Ankara is not so clear, neither in terms of strategy nor even in tactics. Overall, it’s hard to know what it’s thinking about Turkey’s “European prospects” and, more specifically right now, about the pre-election speeches of Turkish pro-Erdogan officials in EU member-states.

Pre-election anxiety strengthened by the rising popularity of anti-systemic, anti-migrant, far-right forces, has been instrumental in Europe as well, especially in the Netherlands and Germany. It has resulted in bans against Turkish officials that demonstrate fear rather than faith in the strength of democracy, even when it is exposed to the test of regimes which are hardly democratic, such as Turkey. Meanwhile, fears that the European Union’s refugee deal with Turkey may collapse have prevented the German and Dutch leaderships from openly condemning the human rights violations in Turkey, resulting in them basically swallowing profound insults from Erdogan and some of his ministers referring to fascists and Nazis. Here’s another paradox: Turkey, which didn’t exactly shine in the war against Nazism, condemning the Netherlands, a victim of Nazism.

And the last of the paradoxes is that Turkish electoral law prohibits pre-election rallies abroad.

Read more …

I’d be interested to see a study like this done for bats. They eat a lot of insects. And there are lots of them: 1/3 of all mammals is a bat I recall reading.

• World’s Spiders Eat More “Meat” Than All Of Mankind (G.)

The world’s spiders eat 400-800m tonnes of insects every year – as much meat and fish as humans consume over the same period, a study said Tuesday. In the first analysis of its kind, researchers used data from 65 previous studies to estimate that a total of 25m metric tonnes of spiders exist on Earth. Taking into account how much food spiders need to survive, the team then calculated the eight-legged creatures’ annual haul of insects and other invertebrates. “Our estimates … suggest that the annual prey kill of the global spider community is in the range of 400-800m metric tons,” they wrote in the journal The Science of Nature. This showed just how big a role spiders play in keeping pests and disease-carriers at bay – especially in forests and grasslands where most of them live.

“We hope that these estimates and their significant magnitude raise public awareness and increase the level of appreciation for the important global role of spiders,” the study authors wrote. For context, the study points out that humans consume about 400m tonnes of meat and fish every year, while whales feed on 280-500 tonnes and seabirds about 70m tonnes of seafood. There are about 45,000 known spider species, all of them meat-eating. And the critters can travel far to feed, swinging from place to place on silken threads that allow them to cover up to 30km (19 miles) in a day. Spiders are found everywhere from the Arctic to the most arid of deserts, in caves, on ocean shores, sand dunes and flood plains, the study authors said.

Read more …

Unbelievable.

• Monsanto Accused of Ghostwriting Papers on Roundup Cancer Risk (BBG)

Monsanto was accused in court documents of ghostwriting scientific literature that led a U.S. regulator to conclude a key chemical in its Roundup weed killer shouldn’t be classified as carcinogenic. Lawyers suing the company on behalf of farmers and others, who claim exposure to glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, alleged in a court filing which was partially blacked out until Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency “may be unaware of Monsanto’s deceptive authorship practice.” The filing was made public by a federal judge in San Francisco handling the litigation. The judge said last month he’s inclined to require a retired EPA official to submit to questioning by plaintiffs’ lawyers who contend he had a “highly suspicious” relationship with Monsanto.

The former official oversaw a committee that found insufficient evidence to conclude glyphosate causes cancer and left his job last year after his report was leaked to the press. The plaintiff lawyers said in the filing that Monsanto’s toxicology manager and his boss were ghost writers for two of the reports, including one from 2000, that the EPA committee relied on to reach its conclusion. Among the documents unsealed Tuesday was a February 2015 internal e-mail exchange at the company about how to contain costs for a research paper. The plaintiff lawyers cited it to support their claim that the EPA report is unreliable, unlike a report by an international agency that classified glyphosate as a probable carcinogen.

“A less expensive/more palatable approach” is to rely on experts only for some areas of contention, while “we ghost-write the Exposure Tox & Genetox sections,” one Monsanto employee wrote to another. The names of outside scientists could be listed on the publication, “but we would be keeping the cost down by us doing the writing and they would just edit & sign their names so to speak,” according to the e-mail, which goes to on say that’s how Monsanto handled the 2000 study.

Read more …

And this is even more unbelievable. After 25 years of Roundup being on the market, not one cancer study has been done.

• Monsanto Colluded With EPA, Could Not Prove Roundup Doesn’t Cause Cancer (ZH)

newly unsealed court documents released earlier today seemingly reveal a startling effort on the part of both Monsanto and the EPA to work in concert to kill and/or discredit independent, albeit inconvenient, cancer research conducted by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)….more on this later. But, before we get into the competing studies, here is a brief look at the ‘extensive’ work that Monsanto and the EPA did prior to originally declaring Roundup safe for use (hint: not much). As the excerpt below reveals, the EPA effectively declared Roundup safe for use without even conducting tests on the actual formulation, but instead relying on industry research on just one of the product’s active ingredients.

“EPA’s minimal standards do not require human health data submissions related to the formulated product – here, Roundup. Instead, EPA regulations require only studies and data that relate to the active ingredient, which in the case of Roundup is glyphosate. As a result, the body of scientific literature EPA has reviewed is not only primarily provided by the industry, but it also only considers one part of the chemical ingredients that make up Roundup.” Meanwhile, if that’s not enough for you, Donna Farmer, Monsanto’s lead toxicologist, even admitted in her deposition that she “cannot say that Roundup does not cause cancer” because “[w]e [Monsanto] have not done the carcinogenicity studies with Roundup.”

[..] In early 2015, once it became clear that the World Health Organization’s IARC was working on their own independent study of Roundup, Monsanto immediately launched their own efforts to preemptively discredit any results that might be deemed ‘inconvenient’. That said, Monsanto, the $60 billion behemoth, couldn’t possibly afford the $250,000 bill that would come with conducting a legitimate scientific study led by accredited scientists. Instead, they decided to “ghost-write” key sections of their report themselves and plotted to then have the independent scientists just “sign their names so to speak.”

Finally, when all else fails, you call in those “special favors” in Washington D.C. that you’ve paid handsomely for over the years. And that’s where Jess Rowland, the EPA’s Deputy Division Director for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention and chair of the Agency’s Cancer Assessment Review Committee, comes in to assure you that he’s fully exploiting his role as the “chair of the CARC” to kill any potentially damaging research…”if I can kill this I should get a medal.”

Read more …

Even HRW has moved to using the politically correct ‘asylum seekers’. for refugees.

• Greece: A Year of Suffering for Asylum Seekers (HRW)

The EU-Turkey deal has trapped thousands of people in abysmal conditions on the Greek islands for the past year, while denying most access to asylum procedures and refugee protection, Human Rights Watch said today. This assessment of conditions is released ahead of the first anniversary of the agreement, signed on March 18, 2016. To carry out the deal, the Greek government has adopted a containment policy, keeping asylum seekers confined to the islands, including in the so-called refugee hotspots and other reception facilities, to facilitate speedy processing and return to Turkey. But continued arrivals, the mismanagement of aid funding, and the slow pace of decision-making, as well as the positive decisions of Greek appeals committees rejecting summary returns to Turkey as unsafe, have led to overcrowded and abysmal conditions on the Greek islands.

These factors, combined with the Greek authorities’ failure to properly identify vulnerable asylum seekers for transfer to the mainland, have resulted in deteriorating security conditions, unnecessary suffering, and despair. “The EU-Turkey deal has been an unmitigated disaster for the very people it is supposed to protect – the asylum seekers trapped in appalling conditions on Greek islands,” said Eva Cossé, Greece researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Greek authorities should ensure that people landing on Greece’s shores have meaningful access to asylum and put an end to the containment policy for asylum seekers. The deal’s flawed assumption that Turkey is a safe country for asylum seekers would allow Greece to transfer them back to Turkey without considering the merits of their asylum claims.

But in the months after the deal was completed, Greek asylum appeals committees have rightly ruled in many instances that Turkey does not provide effective protection for refugees and that asylum applications should be admitted for regular examination on their merits in Greece. Following EU pressure, however, Athens changed the composition of the appeals committees in June, and the restructured committees have ruled in at least 20 cases that Turkey was a safe country, even though it excludes non-Europeans from its refugee protection. That finding was challenged by two Syrian asylum seekers at Greece’s highest court, the Council of State, which heard their case on March 10. No one has yet been forcibly returned to Turkey on the grounds that their asylum application was inadmissible because they could obtain effective protection in Turkey. But if the Council of State turns down the appeal, it could pave the way for mass returns of asylum seekers to Turkey.

Read more …

Boy, the sadness…

• As Greek Crisis Grinds On, Children Pay Price (K.)

In Greece’s grinding economic crisis, a home for abused children is now taking in those whose parents are struggling to feed them. It is perhaps the darkest sign of economic devastation in Greece, where traditionally strong family ties are starting to crumble after years of depression. A quarter of Greece’s workforce is unemployed and a quarter of its children live in poverty, according to United Nations figures, forcing parents to depend on grandparents for handouts. But pensions too have been cut a dozen times. In Athens, the Model National Nursery, set up a century ago for orphans of war, can hardly keep up with the number of parents turning to it for help. Unable to cover their basic needs, parents leave their children in the home all week.

Iro Zervaki, its head, says at least 40 children are on the waiting list, four times as many as a couple of years ago. The home sleeps 25 in a bare room with rows of beds draped in blue blankets, and lacks the staff and funds to increase capacity, she said. Most places are for abused children. Dozens of other children, all aged two to five, come in daily, but the days away from their parents are long. “We had incidents where children even attempted to leave, to run away, to go to their mother,” Zervaki said. In the buzzing playground, a little girl tugged the social worker’s blouse and yelled: “Miss! When will I go to my mum?” “They can’t tell the days apart so every day they ask: ‘Is it Friday?’” Anthoula Zarmakoupi, the social worker, said. “They know mum will pick them up at the weekend.”

Read more …

Caesar, Turkey and the Ides of March

Mar 132017
 
 March 13, 2017  Posted by at 5:41 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Vincenzo Camuccini La Morte Di Cesare 1804

 

I don’t think Holland realized they planned their election on the Ides of March, don’t remember the date or event ever being mentioned when I lived there as a child. That Washington knew what it was doing when back in 2013 it set the end of the latest debt ceiling compromise to March 15 is not likely either. Nor is Janet Yellen deliberately setting the Fed’s ‘next’ rate hike on the date. They may all, in hindsight, wish they had possessed a little more historical knowledge.

When Shakespeare (and Plutarch before him) wrote ‘Beware the Ides of March’, he was talking about the murder of Julius Ceasar in 44 BC, by a group of senators, which included Brutus. But the incident can also be more broadly seen as the separation line between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. And now we’re getting somewhere interesting when looking at present day events. Democracy under threat of absolutism.

Leafing through the Dutch press, opinions differ on which politicians will profit most from the sudden row with Turkey that flared up over the weekend. Is it far right Wilders, who can now claim that he always foresaw things like this? Or is it “just a little less right” PM Rutte, who gets to look like a statesman and a decision maker? None of the other parties, there are 31 in total, look positioned to reap any gains from the bewildering developments.

The Netherlands is the ‘capital of fascism’, said Turkish foreign minister Cavusoglu on Sunday in France, where he ended up after being refused landing rights on Saturday. I know I’m biased, but no matter how you twist and turn it, that’s quite a statement about the country of Anne Frank, which lost most of its extensive Jewish population, and it was only a follow-up to Turkish president Erdogan earlier calling the Dutch ‘nazi’s and ‘remnants of fascists’.

Erdogan later managed ‘banana republic’. And declared that no-one can treat ‘his citizens’ the way a photograph taken Saturday night seemed to depict, in which a Turkish protester was attacked by a police dog. Apart from the question whether dogs should ever be used in quelling protests, this raises another issue crucial to the whole story. That is, Turkey insists that people who’ve lived in other countries for decades are nevertheless ‘its citizens’ (and not of their adopted countries).

As an aside, that story and photo of the dog – a German shepherd- reminds me of ‘When We Were Kings’, the movie about the Rumble in the Jungle fight in Kinshasa between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, in which the latter emerges, upon arrival, from his plane with a huge German shepherd and thereby loses the sympthy of the local people, and some say the whole fight, people had very bad memories about such dogs.

 

So what happened in Holland? About 10 days ago, someone announced there would be a meeting (a rally) on Saturday March 11 in a ‘party hall’ in Rotterdam, that would be attended by Turkish foreign minister Cavusoglu. This set off an alert inside the Dutch government, because in Germany similar meetings had been cancelled in the preceding days. The reason for the cancellations is that these are political rallies to gain support from Turks living abroad for an April 16 referendum designed to give Erdogan very far-reaching powers.

Turkey claims the right to freedom of speech and political gathering. And they would perhaps have been granted this, if not for the July 15 2016 coup in the country, and especially its aftermath. Both Germany and Holland have been aware of Erdogan and his people putting pressure on their ‘citizens’ living abroad to for instance report ‘hidden’ Gülen supporters to embassies and consulates and mosques. In other words, to create divisions between one group of (Dutch or German) Turks and another.

Needless to say, neither Berlin not The Hague wants anything to do with that. But they want to reach some sort of compromise. No matter how they may feel about the country post-coup, Turkey is a NATO partner and the EU has an all-important deal with Ankara to keep refugees away from Europe. Even though it was obvious from the start that this was the dumbest deal with the devil anyone since Faust has ever signed, elections trump common sense and principles.

Over the next days, the Dutch tell Ankara they consider foreign minister Cavusoglu’s planned rally ‘undesirable’. Rotterdam mayor Aboutaleb, a Dutch-Morrocan muslim, bans the planned meeting. But the Turks respond that Cavusoglu will come no matter what, and for Holland to arrange an alternative venue. The Dutch don’t like this at all, but try to compromise with a meeting with a small group of invitees. On Friday, Turkey suggests the Rotterdam residence of the Turkish consul. Aboutaleb is not amused: the location of the home ‘invites’ the gathering of a large number of people outside.

Saturday morning comes with a lot of discussion. The consulate is suggested as a venue. Then, Turkey sends a message to a large group of Dutch Turks to come to the consulate. And while talks are ongoing, Cavusoglu tells CNNTürk TV that if Holland revokes his plane’s landing rights, something that has been mentioned in negotiations only as a last resort, there will be ‘economic and political sanctions’.

 

Rutte and his crew see no other choice than to do just that: revoke the landing rights. To which the response is to drive the -female- Turkish Minister of Family Affairs, Kaya, who’s in Germany, to Rotterdam. There were allegedly even multiple convoys, with decoys and all, so Holland wouldn’t know what car she was in. Meanwhile, the allegations of nazism and fascism had started to be unloaded on The Hague.

As someone remarked: all Erdogan wanted was a photo-op, a picture with 10,000 Turks waving their flags in the streets of Holland. Things turned out different. Minister Kaya made it to Rotterdam, but was refused entry into the consulate, declared an undesirable alien and told she must return to Germany. It took many hours, but finally she was put into a different car than the one she came in and driven back across the border.

From where she took a private plane to Istanbul. Turkey apparently was not clear on the difference between someone having a diplomatic passport and having diplomatic immunity. These things are regulated in the Vienna Convention, and Turkey wants Holland to be found in violation of it. But it doesn’t look like they are. And there are a few other things as well:

 

 

What I don’t get: where in the world does it say that you are free to hold political campaign events in any country you choose? Can you see Guatemalan rallies in the streets of LA? With the risk of clashes between rival groups? And what would Turkey say if an anti-Erdogan protest were held in Berlin tomorrow? You think political rallies by foreigners are allowed in Turkey?

And then the rioting started late Saturday night in Rotterdam. What struck me in the pictures of the riots, and in other footage, is how many times they contain men making hand-signs of either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Grey Wolves, an ultra right wing Turkish group. I don’t get how that fits in the streets of countries like Germany and Holland, and I don’t get how it fits in with the man who’s seen as a demi-god in Turkey, founder in 1923 of the secular country of Turhey, Kemal Atatürk.

It looks like Erdogan is trying to idolize Atatürk, as any Turkish leader would have to do to get votes, and at the same time make the country an islamic state, something Atatürk definitely did not want, but which could Erdogan hand a majority for the referendum next month. Why else does he accuse western Europe of being Islamophobic?

Oh, and how does Michael Flynn fit into this picture? Trump’s former security adviser worked for Erdogan -indirectly- while sitting in on security meetings, and pushed the US to extradite Erdogan’s no. 1 enemy, Fethullah Gülen. If Washington had had proof that Gülen was behind the coup last year, one would think he’d already have been extradited. Flynn’s role gets curiouser by the day. Is this why he was cast out of the Trump team? For being a foreign agent?

 

Also curious is the fact that Erdogan on Friday, the day before the Holland situation played out, was visiting Russia to meet with Putin. He arrived back home to say something about an anti-missile defense system they could build together, and suggested that Putin agreed with him on the danger of the Kurdish fighters in Syria and beyond. Only, Putin never acknowledged such a thing, and Putin has never forgiven Erdogan for downing a Russian jet in November 2015. He just waits for the right payback time. But Turkey is a NATO country.

The EU should never have kept the Union membership carrot dangling in front of Erdogan’s face, knowing full well Turkey would never be accepted as a member, zero chance. It should not have signed the refugee deal either; that could only ever have blown up into its face. The first and major victim of that will once again be Greece. Another country that Erdogan has been trying to bully.

Turkish jets violating Greek airspace are so common people tend to ignore them. Recently, army ships have been sailing into Greek waters too. The idea seems to be some sort of preparation for contesting the 1923 Lausanne Treaty , which settled ownership disputes post-Ottoman Empire. There are so many islands and islets and rocks, anyone who wants to can always find something to fight over. And then of course there’s still Cyprus; negotiations are ongoing, but so are efforts to frustrate them.

And it’s not that the Turkish economy is doing so well, the lira lost 30% in 2016 and another 10% so far this year. But unlike Greece, Turkey still has its own currency, and therefore the ability to devaluate it and absorb financial shocks. Still, 40% in 15 months is a lot. Imports are getting very expensive. Maybe that’s what Erdogan is trying to drown out with his fighting words.

 

This afternoon, Turkey’s Parliament Speaker compared Dutch PM Rutte to Hitler, Franco AND Mussolini. Pol Pot must have slipped his mind for a moment. Denmark, France, Angela Merkel and Brussels have all told Turkey to tone down. But at the same time, German TV network ZDF reports there are 30 more Erdogan rallies and meetings planned in the country in the next month.

Erdogan is trying to let his people see him as a strongman, not afraid of anyone. He only has to paint this picture for another month, through his state owned TV channels, and he’ll get his near absolute powers. Meanwhile, the US and all of the EU are too busy trying to manage their own election issues. But that may not be such a wise choice. On April 17, they may be faced with a near dictator as member of NATO, and with a pro-Islam and anti-EU agenda.

Erdogan is done winning in Europe, and it was even only ever for his home audience to begin with. His biggest gains in votes -and he looks to be 48%-52% behind right now- will have to come from the war theater, where he pretends to fight ISIS only to send his army to kill the Kurds. It would be a good thing if besides Putin there were a few other powers to tell him that’s a no-go. Donald?! Turkey will never beat the Kurds, it’s just an endless bloody battle. Time to make Kurdistan a nation, one way or the other.

It all sort of fits in with the whole political picture these days, doesn’t it? And with Ceasar and the Ides of March.

 

 

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