Feb 212024
 
 February 21, 2024  Posted by at 9:46 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  42 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Landscape with House and Ploughman 1889

 

Assange ‘Too Ill’ To Attend Last Chance UK Appeal Against US Extradition (RT)
President Trump’s Kafkaesque Civil Trial in New York State (Calabresi)
Pay to Play: Trump Faces a Staggering Cost for Appeal (Turley)
US ‘in Decline’ Today Due to ‘Ignorance, Arrogance’ – Pakistani Senator (Sp.)
What Happened To Alexei Navalny This Time Round (Helmer)
The US Is Planning for the Aftermath of Ukraine War (van den Ende)
How The Rosneft Refinery In Germany Is Being Expropriated (Helmer)
Germany Nationalizes Rosneft Deutschland, Poland Will Help (Andrei Gurkov)
As Ramadan Approaches, Israel Threatens War On Lebanon (Harb)
The Resistance Has a Plan for Israel (Alastair Crooke)
The Ever Expanding War (Paul Craig Roberts)
10 Million Illegals Have Entered The US Under Biden (ZH)
Germany Retreats Into The Middle Ages As Its Economy Declines (Henry Johnston)
Fixation on CO2 Ignores Real Driver of Temperature (ET)

 

 


MattOBranain: My rough sketch while trying to listen on a difficult audio feed. At front two Counsels for #Assange, to right behind them Gareth Perice, then from right John Shipton, @GabrielShipton, @Stella_Assange, behind them @ChrisLynnHedges. Also saw @CraigMurrayOrg and @suigenerisjen.

 

 

Trump Haley

 

 

Mike Benz
https://twitter.com/i/status/1759722356975530158

 

 

 

 

Thomas

 

 

Tucker Boris

 

 

Rogan Phil
https://twitter.com/i/status/1760025164677558690

 

 

 

 

“..the victim of his ‘crime’ (journalism) is a state rather than a person–the definition of a political offense, which the US-UK extradition treaty explicitly forbid..”

Assange ‘Too Ill’ To Attend Last Chance UK Appeal Against US Extradition (RT)

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is “too ill” to attend his appeal against the UK’s decision to extradite him to the US, his lawyers have said. The US wants him on 17 charges of espionage tied to WikiLeaks’ publication of State Department and Pentagon files in 2010. Assange, 52, has been held largely in solitary confinement in the Belmarsh maximum security prison in England since 2019, when Ecuador revoked his asylum at American insistence. The Australian-born publisher had requested to appear in court personally, but was unable to do so due to poor health, according to his lawyers. “The world is watching,” Assange’s wife Stella said outside the court house. She accused the US of abusing the legal system to “hound, prosecute and intimidate” and argued that the US “plotted to murder” her husband – referring to revelations that the CIA sought to kill Assange in 2017, when he sheltered in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

“What’s at stake is the ability to publish the truth and expose crimes when they’re committed by states,” Stella Assange told the dozens of demonstrators gathered outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London on Tuesday. Protesters carried Australian flags and signs that said “Free Julian Assange” and “drop the charges.” The Australian parliament passed a motion, supported by the country’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, calling for Assange’s release from British captivity in the run up to the appeal. “The outrageous part of the UK’s years-long ‘trial’ to condemn Julian Assange to die in an American dungeon is that the victim of his ‘crime’ (journalism) is a state rather than a person–the definition of a political offense, which the US-UK extradition treaty explicitly forbid,” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden said on X (formerly Twitter).

Activists outside the court chanted “US, UK, hands off Assange” and “There is only one decision – no extradition,” among other slogans. This week’s hearing will decide whether Assange will be allowed to appeal the 2022 decision by the UK government to extradite him to the US. His attorneys have argued that the extradition would amount to punishment for political opinions and violate the European Convention on Human Rights.

If the appeal fails, Assange will apply to the European Court of Human Rights and seek a Rule 39 order to stop the extradition while it considers the case, Stella Assange has said. In 2010, WikiLeaks published the US military’s Iraq and Afghanistan “war diaries,” as well as a trove of State Department cables. One of the videos, later known as “collateral murder,” showed a US helicopter killing 11 people in Iraq, including two Reuters journalists. Suspecting the Swedish “sexual assault” case was a pretext for the US to arrest him – correctly, as it later emerged – Assange sought asylum in Ecuador, which has no extradition treaty with Washington. He spent the next seven years in the country’s embassy in London, blocked from leaving by the British authorities.

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Kafla indeed.

President Trump’s Kafkaesque Civil Trial in New York State (Calabresi)

Donald Trump has been ordered to pay a $355 million fine and has been barred from doing business in New York State for three years. Judge Arthur Engoron ordered Trump to pay essentially all of his cash reserves of $400 million, which fine if upheld would force Trump to sell some of his real estate holdings to raise cash to live on. Once interest is added on the total fine will rise to $450 million. This is all on top of an $83.3 million fine Trump must pay for allegedly defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. The fines in total could deprive Trump of between 11% and 13% of his wealth. Trump’s adult sons Donald Jr. and Eric have also been fined, and they are barred from doing business in New York State for two years. Ivanka or Melania Trump could legally run the Trump businesses for the next two years, but Judge Engoron appointed retired U.S. District Judge Barbara Jones to continue in her role as an “independent monitor” of the Trump business empire but expanded her authority to review financial disclosures before they are submitted to third parties.

Judge Jones can hire an independent director of compliance, and she has the authority to compel Trump to sell some or even all of his businesses down the road. This is all punishment for Trump allegedly committing fraud by falsely inflating and deflating the value of his real estate assets to pay lower state taxes and to receive more favorable loans from banks. The New York State laws used to go after Trump have NEVER been used in this way, historically, and while Trump may owe some back state taxes, if Judge Engoron is right, not a single bank claimed that it had been defrauded by Trump in the loans it had made to him. This is truly a victimless crime. Bankers took the stand at Trump’s civil trial testifying that they would have gladly made loans to Donald Trump given his extraordinary success as a businessman. It must also be noted that the banks that made loans to Trump did not take his assessment of the net worth of his assets at face value but made their own independent assessments of the value of Trump’s assets.

This is apparently standard practice in the New York State real estate market where borrowers often overstate the value of their assets. The bottom line is that a never before used New York State penalty has been twisted into a tool for a grossly excessive fine and more seriously the completely inappropriate appointment of Judge Jones as an “independent monitor” who can micromanage the Trump business, which she is not competent to do, and to even order the dissolution of the Trump Business in New York State. This outcome was pursued by Letitia James, a politically ambition Democrat, who is the Attorney General of New York State, and who hopes to win a future Democratic primary for Governor of or Senator from New York State.

Ms. James and Judge Engeron have essentially turned a vaguely worded New York State law into a modern day Bill of Attainder targeted at Donald Trump both for political gain and because they despise his political views and desperately want to call his truthfulness into question as he runs for President of the United States in 2024. In doing this, the have violated Trump’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech and of the press; his Fifth Amendment right not to be deprived of liberty or property without due process of law; his Fifth Amendment right not to have property taken away from him except for a pubic use with just compensation being paid; his Eighth Amendment right not to be made to pay an excessive fine; his Article IV, Section 2 right as a citizen of Florida to do make and enforce contracts in New York on the same terms as are other New Yorkers; and his Fourteenth Amendment right to be free to pursue an occupation without unnecessary and burdensome regulation.

The civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump is a travesty and an unjust political act rivaled only in American politics by the killing of former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton by Vice President Aaron Burr. If the New York State appellate courts do not reverse this judgment, the U.S. Supreme Court MUST grant cert on this case and reverse Judge Engeron’s outrageous decisions. National, presidential politics will be permanently altered if a local State’s legal system can be used in this way against candidates for President of the United States. This case raises a national issue of profound importance and if the New York State appellate courts do not address it, the U.S. Supreme Court MUST!

O’Leary
https://twitter.com/i/status/1759969359282463085

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“..every day, Trump is being hit by roughly $90,000 in just interest increases.”

Pay to Play: Trump Faces a Staggering Cost for Appeal (Turley)

In the wake of the massive judgment against Donald Trump, many in New York are celebrating the prospect that the former president could be forced to sell off his property just to be able to appeal the $355 million judgment against him. While Trump has good grounds to object to this excessive fine, he still has to come up with close to a half billion dollars just to make his arguments to the New York Court of Appeals. In order to file an appeal, the courts require a deposit for the full amount of the damages or a bond covering the full amount. Even with escrow options, the call for cash or collateral can be enough to put some executives in a fetal position. It can be challenging enough for many companies drained from years of litigation. For Donald Trump, the demand for $355 million plus $100 milion in interest could force a fire sale on properties to pony up just the deposit.

Many of us have been critical of the ruling of Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron who imposed the astronomical fine despite finding that Trump’s “victims” not only did not lose a single dollar but made handsome profits. Indeed, these banks testified that they wanted to continue to do business with Trump as a “whale” client, but Engoron is now barring them from doing so. Putting aside the merits of this judgment, the threshold deposit rule magnifies the unfairness of this New York law that does not require that anyone actually lose money to claim hundreds of millions from a company. One can argue that, if upheld, any insolvency is the fault of the company. However, this rule can force insolvency just to seek review of a judgment. For Trump, even this fine would only amount to roughly 14-17% of his wealth. The addition of the recent $83.3 million in damages imposed in a separate New York courtroom for defamation would bring the demand to over half a billion dollars in deposits with interest.

So, by making the fine so large, Engoron not only makes an appeal difficult, but could guarantee that Trump will lose tens of millions even if his judgment is dramatically reduced or tossed out. On top of this looming penalty, however, he already owes the writer E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in damages from a separate defamation case that concluded in January. His legal fees are also mounting as he battles four criminal cases at the federal and state level. There is already speculation of whether Trump will have to leverage or sell his iconic properties at distressed prices. He has 30-days to ante up with the court and buyers could use that deadline to their advantage. The added amount is due to another New York provision imposing a massive 9 percent interest rate on judgments. That means that every day, Trump is being hit by roughly $90,000 in just interest increases.

Trump could secure a bond, but such a guaranty would come at its own premium price. However, a bonding company requires a defendant to put up 10% for the total and would lose that amount even if he prevailed. That is a roughly $45 million cost just to secure the right to an appeal. In this case, the cost could be higher given the judgment and the bar on Trump doing business for three years in New York. The expectation is that Trump can make the deposit or secure a bond to avoid what some gleefully called a “fire sale” on this properties. The deposit is now being celebrated as an added indignity and penalty. However, as New Yorkers cheer this moment, many business are likely wondering “but for the grace of God go I.” Undervaluing or overvaluing property is a common practice, particularly in real estate. That is why representations, like the one made by the Trump Corporation, come with a warning that estimates are their own and that the banks need to make their assessments.

Faced with high crime and high taxes, the spectacle in Manhattan is only likely to accelerate the exodus of businesses and high-earners from the city. That prospect has already alarmed Gov. Kathy Hochul who declared “business people have nothing to worry about, because they’re very different than Donald Trump and his behavior.” That sounds a lot like “you are fine so long as you are not Trump.” Yet, that is not reassuring to businesses who want a legal system that is based on something other than selective and arbitrary enforcement. Attorney General Letitia James campaigned on bagging Trump without even bothering to name the offense. She also sought to dissolve the National Rifle Association. The line between doing business and a public execution appears to be the dubious discretion of Letitia James. That is not the type of assurance that most businesses would accept in risking billions in investment. Despite the high taxes and falling services in New York, the city remained a draw for business as a commercial and legal center. The experience and objectivity of courts in dealing with business disputes was a selling point for companies.

That has been shattered by the James campaign and the Engoron ruling. Telling business to just “don’t be like Trump” is more menacing than consoling. Letitia James is now the face of New York corporate law — it is the “face that launched a thousand ships” . . . toward Florida. Businesses can get lower taxes, lower crime, better schools, and a better regulatory environment in virtually any other state. Fewer are likely to want to come for the shows, but stay for the disgorgement. Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary said Monday that he would “never” invest in New York after this absurd judgment. Creating an ad hoc business code for Trump undermines the city’s reputation as a premier jurisdiction for corporate and tax law. If the rate of exit increases, it will impact not just employees working for these companies (like the Trump companies) but the vast network of supporting businesses, including law firms. As New York politicians campaigning on “eat the rich” platforms, the confiscatory Trump judgment leaves many in the city wondering if they could be the next course.

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“The US I knew was a very strong and inclusive society, welcoming towards foreigners. They used to be multicultural and multireligious. Now I see a lot of paranoia and a lot of xenophobia in the US..”

US ‘in Decline’ Today Due to ‘Ignorance, Arrogance’ – Pakistani Senator (Sp.)

The reasons why the United States failed in Afghanistan and Iraq and is “in decline” today are its “ignorance and arrogance,” the chairman of the defense committee of the Senate of Pakistan, Mushahid Hussain Sayed, told Sputnik. “The US policy towards certain countries in Asia is sometimes based on the combination of ignorance and arrogance. Arrogance, because they are a big country, because they think of themselves as a superpower, they think they know it all. But they don’t. They don’t know the culture and the values of other countries. And also ignorance, because they don’t understand the people of these places. This is why they failed in Afghanistan, this is why they failed in Iraq,” Sayed said in an interview.

These are the same reasons why the US is “in decline” now and has been like that for some time, he added. The senator explained that he used to live in the US, received a masters degree from one of the most respected US universities in Washington — Georgetown, and worked in the US Congress as an intern. However, the country had changed a lot since then and the US he knew “was different.” “The US I knew was a very strong and inclusive society, welcoming towards foreigners. They used to be multicultural and multireligious. Now I see a lot of paranoia and a lot of xenophobia in the US. They call the Chinese threat, the Russian threat, the Islamic threat … That’s nonsense. They are returning to the 50s. So for me the modern US is a very strange, exclusive and divisive America,” the senator said.

In October 2001, a US-led coalition launched an invasion of Afghanistan. However, the Taliban took power in Afghanistan in August 2021, triggering the collapse of the US-backed government and accelerating Washington’s troop pullout. On August 31 of the same year, US forces completed their withdrawal from the country, ending the 20-year-long military presence. In March 2003, the US-led coalition invaded Iraq without a UN Security Council resolution. Consequently, the total of excess deaths related to the war amounted to 654,965 as of October 2006, according to The Lancet journal’s survey. The US troops withdrew from Iraq in December 2011. Despite that, to date, the US and coalition forces remain a notable military presence in the country, with military bases.

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“Inside Russia, it has been obvious for a long time that in or out of prison, Navalny alive was politically insignificant; now even less. The new western propaganda is as ineffectual for Russians as Navalny was himself.”

What Happened To Alexei Navalny This Time Round (Helmer)

Since a pack of lies about Alexei Navalny won last year’s Oscar for the best documentary film of the year when he was alive, there’s no doubt he can win another Oscar when he’s dead. But alive or dead, the prize-winning propaganda of Navalny’s story bears no resemblance to the truth. This is what happens in wartime, especially when the side which is losing the war on the battlefield – that’s the US, NATO and the Ukraine – claims to be winning the war of words against Russia. The Navalny story is now in two parts: Part 1, the Novichok in his airport cup of tea, in his hotel water bottle, and then in his underpants which causes Navalny’s collapse, but fails to be detected by Russian doctors in Omsk, by German doctors in Berlin and Munich, and then by Swedish and French state laboratories. Part 2, Navalny’s sudden death after he had taken a walk in the IK-3 penal colony in the village of Kharp, in the Russian Arctic region of Yamalo-Nenets.

The first part took 62 reports in this archive to expose the faking; the most telling evidence of this came from Navalny himself in the documented tests of his blood, urine and hair. According to these data, Navalny’s collapse was the outcome of an overdose of lithium, benzodiazepines, and other drugs. Part 2 of the Navalny story began last Friday, February 16, with the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) announcement, followed by an official telegramme to his mother in Moscow, that he had died just after two in the afternoon, Yamalo-Nenets time; that was just after noon Moscow time. Two hours later the Russian media began carrying the official announcement. The wording of the last line of the announcement is significant. “The causes of death are being established”, the FSIN statement said. Causes — plural.

In the UK coroner’s court practice, what this means is that there is likely to have been a sequence of causation, medically speaking, with the first or proximate cause of death identified as heart, brain, or lung injury or failure; and the second, intervening or contributory cause of death such as biochemical factors, including prescription drugs in lethal combination; mRNA anti-Covid vaccination triggering fatal blood clots; or homicidal poisons. For example, in the case of the alleged Russian Novichok death of Dawn Sturgess in England in 2018, the evidence is of British government tampering with the post-mortem reports to add Novichok when it wasn’t identified at first. In Navalny’s case, poisoning on the order of President Vladimir Putin has already been announced as the cause of Navalny’s death without evidence at all. The delay time required for the complicated processes of forensic pathology and toxicology to establish the evidence has been reported in the Anglo-American media to signify cover-up and body snatching. Meduza, an oppositionist publication in Riga, reports that “a doctor who advised Navalny’s associates” has said that blood clotting was “an unlikely cause of death” – this is medically false.

In speculation of poisoning as cause of death, there is at least as much likelihood that Navalny, his team, and their CIA and MI6 handlers devised a repeat of the August 2020 Tomsk operation; decided when Navalny met with his lawyer at the prison on February 14; but implemented two days later without the resuscitation Navalny himself was expecting. The Anglo-American propaganda warfare army is already pronouncing the contributory Cause 2– Putin did it — as the cause of Navalny’s death. If the Russians announce the proximate Cause 1 as cardiac arrest or brain aneurism, without a Cause 2, they won’t be believed. In the short term, Cause 2 cannot be established with credibility in Russia since it took the British government ten years, 2006-2016, to fabricate their story of Russian polonium poisoning in the Alexander Litvinenko case. In the Russian Novichok cases in England, it has so far taken six years of court, police and pathologist proceedings, 2018-2024, without outcome, and another two years will follow.

The problem for readers to interpret what has happened is that the Anglo-American propaganda warfare machine is better at what it does than the Russian side. But then when it comes to war with guns, not words, the Russian side is far superior, as can be seen in the Ukraine right now. Accordingly, the Kremlin has decided to concentrate on the main fight. Inside Russia, it has been obvious for a long time that in or out of prison, Navalny alive was politically insignificant; now even less. The new western propaganda is as ineffectual for Russians as Navalny was himself.

Nap Navalny
https://twitter.com/i/status/1760094451521970418

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“Nowhere outside the U.S. can you find as many American politicians in one place as at the Munich Security Conference this year.”

The US Is Planning for the Aftermath of Ukraine War (van den Ende)

According to the Rand Corporation, there are two scenarios for the United States: “after” the less favorable war or “after” the more favorable war. The prominent think tank for U.S. policymaking recently published a long report on the so-called aftermath of the war in Ukraine. Washington and its NATO allies have to admit that the U.S. is losing another proxy war together with its satellite states of Europe. Previously they lost in Afghanistan (after more than 20 years, a second Vietnam), also recently in Syria and Iraq, and now in Ukraine. Even so-called “Russia experts” in Europe admit that Ukraine is losing. “I do not rule out that Ukraine will lose the war this year. Europe has misjudged the Russian army,” says Belgian “Russia expert” Joris van Blade to De Standaard. Russia has the initiative again and the Russian people are not going to stop the war, he thinks. “We have missed historic opportunities to make Europe safer.”

According to the Rand study, two scenarios are possible: a so-called “hardline” or a “softline” postwar. Of course, the U.S. prefers a softline postwar outcome, where they still have room for manipulation and possible coup d’état and Balkanization (partition) of Russia just like they did in former Yugoslavia. According to Rand, the U.S. military presence in Europe has increased to around 100,000 personnel since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation in February 2022. The United States deployed attack aviation from Germany to Lithuania; Patriot air defense systems from Germany to Slovakia and Poland; and F-15 tactical fighters from the United Kingdom to Poland. In addition, European countries are sending F-16s to Romania, as the Netherlands recently indicated. These F-16s are capable of attacking Russian cities. Washington characterized these deployments as part of a wartime surge to deter Russia from expanding its aggression beyond Ukraine to attack U.S. allies in Europe.

Leaders in Europe are almost hysterical. One after another, they proclaim that Russia is going to invade Europe, starting with Moldova, the Baltic States, and Poland. The Netherlands, Germany, and France are warning their people to expect an attack from Russia, as is Sweden, which recently joined NATO. The population is being frightened by the unhinged rhetoric of their politicians. Conscription must be reactivated and Germany even has a concept ready to recruit migrants (about 1.5 million serviceable men) and entice them to get a passport. European leaders are also concerned about the upcoming elections in the U.S. after Republican contender Donald Trump made comments suggesting he would quit NATO and let Europe fend for itself. They are worried that the U.S. might abandon them. During a recent NATO conference in Brussels, a lot of war rhetoric was spoken. “We live in an era where we have to expect the unexpected,” said Dutch NATO Admiral Rob Bauer. Meanwhile, the Danish and German defense ministers have warned of a potential war with Russia within five years.

The U.S. and European leaders assume the “hardline” scenario is likely in the next few years. They proclaim through their mouthpieces in the corporate-controlled news media that Russia is becoming much more “risk-acceptant”. Therefore, it is calculated that a hardline approach may increase NATO’s ability to deter purported Russian aggression. It’s that time of year again for the hawkish Munich Security Conference, in Bavaria, Germany. This is the forum where President Putin provoked alarm when he gave his famous speech in 2007, making it clear that the unipolar world was over and a multipolar world would emerge in the foreseeable future. Putin’s prognosis caused much chagrin for Western leaders. This year’s theme at Munich is animated by Trump’s supposed undermining of NATO.

The appeal for support from the U.S. has become more urgent among some European politicians. Ukraine lacks weapons and ammunition, they openly say. Russia is sometimes five times superior on the battlefield. In addition, a U.S. support package worth around $60 billion was approved by the Senate last week but the Republican-dominated House of Representatives could reject it – and so far it looks like it will. Europe, in turn, would not be able to fill this gap and, therefore, Ukraine will lose the proxy war for the U.S. and the West. In addition to the presence of Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, the European leaders and lobbyists will also use the opportunity in Munich to lobby Republican Senators and Representatives to support Ukraine (with money). Nowhere outside the U.S. can you find as many American politicians in one place as at the Munich Security Conference this year.

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2 articles, one topic. Germany steals a Russian company.

How The Rosneft Refinery In Germany Is Being Expropriated (Helmer)

This is how the war in the Ukraine doesn’t end, not for the Germans and the Poles. So long as they can, they plan to steal or destroy Russian assets west of what used to be Kievan Ukraine; and mobilize the US military bases in both countries to reinforce and defend their larcenies. The German political party which promises to continue this war for the employment of German workers and the enrichment of German executives and shareholders will win the next election, replacing the Social Democratic Party and the Greens as the party of war. The post-Ukraine strategy of the Stavka starts here — To Berlin! On Friday last, the Russian language edition of the German state medium Deutsche Welle (DW) published a report of German and Polish government plans for the expropriation of PCK, the Rosneft crude oil refinery at Schwedt in northern Germany, and the Rosneft network of operating assets in Germany, Poland, and Austria.

The German assets of Rosneft, the Russian state oil production company under worldwide sanctions, had been placed under what the German government called “fiduciary management” by an “independent” state regulator in September 2022. This was announced at the time as a temporary arrangement to comply with the sanctions, renewable every six months, but leaving undisturbed the Russian ownership of the assets. This scheme was renewed at six monthly intervals, as Rosneft has reported. There was nothing independent about the BNA or what it has been doing every six months. BNA stands for the Federal Network Agency — Bundesnetzagentur für Elektrizität, Gas, Telekommunikation, Post und Eisenbahnen. It claims to be “an independent higher federal authority with its main office in Bonn operating within the scope of business of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and the Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV). We have been responsible for Germany’s essential electricity, gas, telecommunications and postal infrastructures for over 20 years.”

“Within the scope of” is a German fig leaf for “under control”. “Our task,” BNA says, is “to ensure fair and non-discriminatory competition for all market participants. Our success and our expertise in regulation led to the energy and rail sectors also being placed under our responsibility.” This was not what the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz intended when it commenced its takeover of Rosneft and assigned BNA the role of camp guard. BNA described what it was doing to “safeguard security of supply in Germany…on the basis of the Energy Security of Supply Act (section 17 EnSiG) until 15 March 2023. This basis enables the fiduciary to take action to keep the business running in accordance with its importance for the functioning of society in the energy sector. The fiduciary management may be extended under certain conditions… The decision to introduce fiduciary management was prompted by…by the sanctions imposed on Russia…The fiduciary management means that the original owner no longer has authority to issue instructions.”

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“The German government is running out of time: on March 10, when the next decision on the transfer of Rosneft Deutschland under the so-called trust management of the state expires..”

Germany Nationalizes Rosneft Deutschland, Poland Will Help (Andrei Gurkov)

Expropriation of Rosneft’s German assets is becoming increasingly likely. Warsaw is ready to provide oil to the Schwedt refinery and replace supplies from Kazakhstan. But what about compensation? The nationalization of Rosneft’s German assets is becoming more and more likely, and new signals from Poland reinforce this impression. The German government is running out of time: on March 10, when the next decision on the transfer of Rosneft Deutschland under the so-called trust management of the state expires. Berlin, apparently, no longer wants to extend this regime introduced in September 2022 for six months, because they seek a stable, not temporary, solution to the fate of the oil refinery in Schwedt — PCK Raffinerie Schwedt. This is exactly the case, although Rosneft has other assets in Germany.

But in this refinery, the state-owned Russian concern actually owns 54%, and maintaining Moscow’s control over a strategically important enterprise seems to the German authorities to be too much of a risk, especially against the background of the growing threat from Russia. After all, PCK Raffinerie Schwedt provides petroleum products to a significant part of East Germany and, above all, to the capital of the country, Berlin, with its approximately four million inhabitants. The intention of the German government to put an end to the legally suspended state of the plant has clearly strengthened after the recent elections in Poland. They brought to power a pro-European coalition, which German politicians trust much more than the previous Polish government. Relations between the two countries are currently warming rapidly, as evidenced by the talks between the new Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin on February 12.

Therefore, the visit of Vice Chancellor and Minister of Economy of Germany Robert Habeck to Warsaw the next day, February 13, played an important, and perhaps decisive role in determining the next concrete steps with regard to Rosneft Deutschland. “Poland has helped a lot in the past to provide oil to the east of Germany,” the German minister recalled after the talks and made it clear that in the event of the expropriation of Rosneft, the supply of the plant in Schwedt would improve, since the Polish side is ready to significantly increase the pumping of oil through its territory towards Germany from the port of Gdansk. According to the Reuters news agency, citing an informed source, Warsaw assured Berlin even before Habeck’s arrival that it would be able, if necessary, to completely replace the volumes of Kazakh oil currently flowing to Schwedt.

Some explanations are needed here. Until 2023, this refinery, built six decades ago in the GDR on the border with Poland, operated exclusively on oil coming from the USSR and then from Russia via the Druzhba oil pipeline. In response to the full-scale Russian aggression against Ukraine, the European Union imposed an embargo on Russian oil transported by tankers, but not on supplies via the Druzhba pipeline system, since several Eastern European EU members are still heavily dependent on them. However, the German government decided for its part to completely abandon Russian oil. Since last year, the Schwedt plant has been supplied with oil purchased on the world market in three ways. From the German Baltic port of Rostock via a longstanding and not very powerful pipeline that was originally laid down as a backup — through the Polish port of Gdansk, from where oil is pumped through Poland using the westernmost segment of the Druzhba, and from Kazakhstan in transit through the Russian territory on the same Druzhba.

Germany strongly emphasizes its desire to increase oil purchases in Kazakhstan, cooperation with which is becoming more intensive. However, there are fears that in the event of the nationalization of Rosneft’s German assets, Moscow will block the Druzhba oil pipeline as a retaliatory measure and thereby [stop] the supply of Kazakh oil. [..] It is noteworthy that articles in the German media about Robert Habeck’s negotiations in Warsaw, and in general about the future of Rosneft Deutschland, in effect do not consider the option of Rosneft selling this company and its assets. This is despite the letter with such a proposal, as the economic newspaper Handelsblatt wrote in early February, from the head of the Russian concern Igor Sechin to the German government. But Berlin, the publication concluded, “has placed its bet on expropriation.”

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“..the regional backlash threatens to undermine US diplomacy, unravel Arab normalization deals with Israel, and jeopardize US business interests throughout West Asia..”

As Ramadan Approaches, Israel Threatens War On Lebanon (Harb)

Tel Aviv’s mounting threats to destroy Beirut as it has done to Gaza, coupled with growing Israeli public support for aggressive military action against Lebanon, have spiked tensions on the northern battlefront in recent days. Furthermore, the precarious game at play in Washington – which has done absolutely nothing to impede Israeli occupation forces from launching an assault on Rafah and uprooting more than a million Palestinians from their last refuge on the Egyptian border – is driving the war to a volatile, dangerous brink. Adding fuel to this already incendiary mix are two critical factors. First, Israel’s targeted strikes on Lebanese civilians, exemplified by the recent attacks in Nabatiyeh and Al-Sowanah, have provoked a stern response from Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, who vowed retribution, declaring that “the price of civilian blood will be blood.”

Second is the approaching month of Ramadan, a sacred period observed by hundreds of millions of Muslims worldwide, which adds a transnational dimension to these developments. Fasting Muslims from Indonesia to Morocco will grow increasingly frustrated with Washington’s inaction in preventing genocide and the displacement of over two million Palestinians in Gaza, many of whom are on the brink of starvation. Despite US assurances that it is pressuring Israel to mitigate casualties, the relentless onslaught has resulted in an appalling daily death toll of around 300, with nearly 29,000 lives lost, and over 60 percent of homes and infrastructure decimated. When Nasrallah declared that “for every drop of blood shed in Gaza and the entire region, the primary responsibility falls on [US President Joe] Biden, [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken, and [US Secretary of Defense Lloyd] Austin,” his words resonated deeply – not only within the Islamic world but with millions globally – calling for an end to the war by halting the influx of American weapons to the Israeli military.

The US State Department has received multiple warnings from diplomats in the region of the growing resentment toward Washington for its complicity in Israel’s genocidal campaign. Despite its tone-deaf attempts to adjust its stance and emphasize a need to protect Palestinian civilians, the regional backlash threatens to undermine US diplomacy, unravel Arab normalization deals with Israel, and jeopardize US business interests throughout West Asia. Speaking to The Cradle, sources close to the Axis of Resistance in Lebanon said the next fortnight carries the potential for a catastrophic escalation, particularly if Israel intensifies its military aggression during Ramadan and advances its plans to displace Palestinians from Rafah.

Additionally, the discontent among Israeli settlers displaced by Lebanese resistance operations along the northern border poses further risks, with officials in Tel Aviv contemplating drastic measures to ensure calm, including potential military action – a preview of which southern Lebanese civilians have recently witnessed. The discontent among northern settlers grows as they grapple with the new security dynamics in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Al-Aqsa Flood operation on 7 October. Extending over 100 kilometers from Naqoura to the Shebaa Farms and penetrating 5 to 10 kilometers deep, this border strip has seen the displacement of thousands of settler families.

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“..They want us to pay a price without Israel committing to a thing..”

The Resistance Has a Plan for Israel (Alastair Crooke)

In a speech on Tuesday, Hizbullah leader Seyed Nasrallah said that the Party will continue the border offensive until at least the Gaza massacre stops. The war in Gaza however, is far from over. And Nasrallah warned that even were a ceasefire to be reached in Gaza, “should the enemy perform any action, we will return to operating according to the rules and formulas that existed before. The purpose of the resistance is to deter the enemy, and we will react accordingly”. Israel’s Defence Secretary Gallant has underlined that contrary to international consensus expectations, he too expects the war in Lebanon to continue. Gallant said the military has stepped up its attacks against Hizbullah by one level out of ten: “The Air Force planes flying currently in the skies of Lebanon have heavier bombs for more distant targets. Hizbullah went up half a step, whilst we, a full one … We can attack not only at 20 kilometres [from the border], but also at 50 kilometres, and in Beirut and anywhere else”.

It is not clear what ‘red line’ Hizbullah would have to cross for Israel to significantly escalate its response to much higher levels; Israeli leaders have suggested that an attack on a strategic site; or an attack leading to major civilian casualties; or a substantive barrage on Haifa might constitute the breaking point. Nonetheless, with three military divisions rather than the usual one now deployed in the north of Israel, the IDF has more forces poised for action on the northern border than it has preparing for an incursion into Rafah – at this point. It is clear, as Chief of Staff Halevy has specified, that Israel is “preparing for war” against Hizbullah (more than preparing for Rafah). Is the threat to Rafah a bluff to put pressure on Hamas to concede on the deal and hostages? One way or another, both Israel’s political and military chiefs are adamant: The IDF will incurse into Rafah – ‘at some point’. The qualitatively different Hizbullah’s strike on Safed on Israel’s northern regional command HQ on Wednesday – which that resulted in 2 dead and 7 further casualties – is being treating in Israel as the gravest attack since the start of the war, with Ben Gvir calling it a “declaration of war”. Subsequent Israeli attacks killed 11 people, including six children, in a barrage of strikes on villages across southern Lebanon, in retribution for the Safed blitz – with the fierce exchange of fire still continuing.

The ‘Safed Strike’ deep into the Galilee very likely was intended to signal that Hizbullah is not about to capitulate to western demands that it provide Israel with a ceasefire that is intended to facilitate evacuated Israelis to return to their homes in the north. As Nasrallah confirmed in a scathing attack on those external (Western) mediators who serve only as Israel’s lawyers, and neglect to address the massacres in Gaza: “It is easier to move the Litani River forward to the borders, than to push back Hezbollah fighters from the borders, to behind the Litani River … They want us to pay a price without Israel committing to a thing”. In these circumstances, Nasrallah clarified that residents of northern Israel will not return to their homes – warning that even more Israelis risk being displaced: “‘Israel’ must prepare shelters, basements, hotels and schools to house two million settlers who will be evacuated from northern Palestine, [were Israel to expand the war zone].”

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“..The inaction of Putin, China, and Iran has steeled the American neoconservatives in their agenda of American hegemony..”

The Ever Expanding War (Paul Craig Roberts)

As I previously wrote, the Israeli/American intention is to expand the war against Hamas to Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The expansion has begun. The latest news is that Israel has struck deep into Lebanon: “War Expands With Massive Israeli Airstrikes 60km Deep Into Lebanon.” The Arabs, likely restrained by Putin, have once again sat on their butts while Israel picks them off one by one. Only the Houthis but not a single Arab or Muslim country came to Hamas’ help. Consequently, the Arabs sat sucking their thumbs while Gaza and Hamas were destroyed. The arabs accepted Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Evil prevails when it is left unopposed. If Hezbollah, Syria, the Iraqi militias, and Iran had joined Hamas’ attack, Israel today would not exist. Having missed their chance, they will now be knocked off one at a time by Israel and Washington.

Already before Israel is finished with Palestine, Israel has attacked with missiles and jet fighters deep into Lebanon. It appears that the Israeli-Washington strategy is to attack Lebanese cities to set off civil war between the Lebanese army and the Hezbollah militia so that Israel can take advantage of civil war in Lebanon to drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon and take possession of the water resources that Israel covets. When Hezbollah is finished, Washington and Israel will wipe out the Iraqi militias and attack Syria, a section of which containing the oil fields Washington already occupies. The Russians left the liberation of Syria unfinished. Syria has the Russian air defense system but apparently is not permitted to use it against Washington and Israel. Once Iraqi militias and Syria are out of the picture, Iran, sitting there on its huge number of missiles, doing nothing, will be next.

When Iran falls, the CIA’s Jihadists will be released into the Russian Federation, Central Asia, and China’a troublesome province. The inaction of Putin, China, and Iran has steeled the American neoconservatives in their agenda of American hegemony. As Putin, XI, and Iran seem determined to sit out conflicts that not only affect them but are directed against them, Washington will continue to run over red lines until a war is forced. Putin has been deceived, betrayed, demonized, and given the West’s cold shoulder for two decades, and he still wants to negotiate with those who have thrashed him? Negotiation with a government that has proven it doesn’t keep the agreements is a form of reality denial. As the evidence indicates, the Western world is in moral and social collapse, so its destruction will be no loss. The question is whether the values the Christian West once stood for will find expression elsewhere.

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Pretty crazy..

10 Million Illegals Have Entered The US Under Biden (ZH)

A record 7.3 million illegal aliens have crossed the southwest border under President Biden’s watch, a number which according to Fox News.is greater than the population of 36 individual states. That figure is sourced from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has already reported 961,537 Southwest land border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September, and if the current pace of illegal immigration does not slow down, fiscal year 2024 will break last year’s record of 2,475,669 southwest border encounters — a number that by itself exceeds the population of New Mexico. The total number of southwest land border encounters since Biden assumed office in 2021 is 7,298,486, CBP data shows.

That number is larger than the population of 36 U.S. states including: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming. In fact, the only states that are not in danger of being “replaced” are the blue ones. Compared to the largest U.S. states, the 7.3 million number is about 18.7% of California’s population of 39 million, 23.9% of the state of Texas and its 31 million residents, 32.3% of the population of Florida and 37.3% of New York. It’s more than half the size of Pennsylvania, Illinois and Ohio. As Fox News graphically describes, were the number of illegal immigrants who entered the United States under President Biden gathered together to found a city, it would be the second-largest city in America after New York.

Shockingly, that total does not include an estimated additional 1.6 million illegals who entered the US at other locations, nor 1.8 million known “gotaways” who evaded law enforcement, which would make the total bigger than the population of New York. Taken together, over 10 million migrants have crossed into the U.S. illegally during the Biden administration, a record Biden’s critics assert could only be achieved by intentionally refusing to enforce the law. “This unprecedented surge in illegal immigration isn’t an accident. It is the result of deliberate policy choices by the Biden administration,” said Eric Ruark, Director of Research for Numbers USA, a nonprofit that advocates for immigration restrictions.

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“..renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.”

Germany Retreats Into The Middle Ages As Its Economy Declines (Henry Johnston)

Bloomberg recently foretold the end of Germany’s days as an industrial power in an article that begins with a depiction of the closing of a factory in Dusseldorf. Stone-faced workers preside with funereal solemnity over the final act – the fashioning of a steel pipe at a rolling mill – at the century-old plant. The “flickering of flares and torches” and “somber tones of a lone horn player” lend the scene a decidedly medieval atmosphere. Intentional or not in their inclusion of such evocative detail, the Bloomberg writers offer potent imagery for Germany – not only because the country is regressing economically but because its elites are increasingly guided by an atavistic force: the abandonment of reason. As hard economic realities lay bare the futility of its utopian energy plan and the consequences of numerous terrible decisions mount, Germany is experiencing what Swedish essayist Malcom Kyeyune calls “narrative collapse.”

The peculiar offspring of this, Kyeyune argues, is a turn toward ritual, superstition, and taboo. It is a malaise afflicting the entire West, but Germany is suffering a particularly acute case. Kyeyune defines this as an occurrence “when social and political circumstances change too rapidly for people to keep up, the result tends to be collective manias, social panics, and pseudo-religious revivalist millenarianism.” The abandonment of reason can be conceived of in various ways. Quite a lot of ink has already been spilled about the irrationality behind Germany’s fantastically improbable climate policy. Indeed, the quasi-religious verve with which this program has been rolled out speaks to something of a loosening of the country’s moorings. But as we will see shortly, the problem goes far beyond an attachment to unattainable policy goals. Prominent German business executive Wolfgang Reitzle argued that for the government to deliver on its climate and energy policy, capacities for wind and solar power would have to be more than quadrupled, while storage and back-up capacities would have to be massively increased.

Such a plan is “neither technically feasible nor affordable for a country like Germany,” Reitzle argues. What it is then, he concludes, “is simply insanity.” Michael Shellenberger, in a piece for Forbes magazine in 2019, points out that the initial impetus for seeking to transition to renewables emerged from the idea that human civilization should be scaled back to sustainable levels. He cites German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1954 landmark essay ‘The Question Concerning of Technology’ and subsequent work by the likes of Barry Commoner and Murray Bookchin as espousing what emerged in the 1960s as a much more austere vision for the future of civilization. Shellenberger concludes that the reason why “renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to. One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they could.”

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“..temperature doesn’t follow CO2—instead, CO2 follows temperature, which, itself, is due to solar activity.”

Fixation on CO2 Ignores Real Driver of Temperature (ET)

Each year from 2023 to 2030, climate change sustainable development goals will cost every person in economies such as the United States $2,026, the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development estimates. In lower-income economies, the per-person annual cost ranges from $332 to $1,864. In total, the global price tag comes to about $5.5 trillion per year. Separately, a report from the left-aligned nonprofit Climate Policy Initiative found that in 2021 and 2022, the world’s taxpayers spent $1.3 trillion each year on climate-related projects. It also found that the “annual climate finance needed” from 2031 to 2050 is more than $10 trillion each year. “Anyone who willfully denies the impact of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future,” President Joe Biden said on Nov. 14, 2023, while announcing $6 billion in new investments through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). “The impacts we’re seeing are only going to get worse, more frequent, more ferocious, and more costly.”

At its signing in August 2022, President Biden said the IRA “invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever—ever, ever, ever—in confronting the climate crisis and strengthening our economic—our energy security.” A report from Goldman Sachs put the dollar amount much higher, stating, “Critical funding for this next energy revolution is expected to come from the IRA, which will provide an estimated $1.2 trillion of incentives by 2032.” The trillions of dollars being poured into new initiatives stem from the goals set by the United Nations’ Paris Agreement’s legally binding international treaty to “substantially reduce global greenhouse gas emissions” in the hope of maintaining a temperature of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But any decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions won’t have an effect for hundreds to thousands of years—even under the most restrictive circumstances, according to some experts. “If emissions of CO2 stopped altogether, it would take many thousands of years for atmospheric CO2 to return to ‘pre-industrial’ levels,” the Royal Society states in a report on its website. The organization describes itself as a “fellowship of many of the world’s most eminent scientists.” “Surface temperatures would stay elevated for at least a thousand years, implying a long-term commitment to a warmer planet due to past and current emissions,” the report states. “The current CO2-induced warming of Earth is therefore essentially irreversible on human timescales.”

A frequently asked questions page on NASA’s website holds the same position. “If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, the rise in global temperatures would begin to flatten within a few years. Temperatures would then plateau but remain well-elevated for many, many centuries,” NASA states. And, other scientists say, that’s because CO2 isn’t the culprit in the first place. “CO2 does not cause global warming. Global warming causes more CO2,” said Edwin Berry, a theoretical physicist and certified consulting meteorologist. He called Royal Society’s position on CO2 “pure junk science.” Ian Clark, emeritus professor for the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Ottawa, agreed that if all greenhouse gas emissions ceased today, the Earth would continue warming—but not because of CO2. He said that contrary to popular opinion, temperature doesn’t follow CO2—instead, CO2 follows temperature, which, itself, is due to solar activity.

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Vaxx
https://twitter.com/i/status/1760000991980593608

 

 

Cat perfume

 

 

Dinosaur Size
https://twitter.com/i/status/1760025082657706403

 

 

Blink an eye

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 242024
 
 January 24, 2024  Posted by at 9:45 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  43 Responses »


Nicolas de Staël Paris la nuit 1954

 

Trump ‘Honored’ By New Hampshire Win, Says Republican Party ‘Very United’ (Fox)
Israel Risks Dragging Egypt Into War (Blade)
Russia Will Do Everything to Integrate Egypt Into BRICS – Putin (Sp.)
UN Agency Says 570,000 People in Gaza Strip Face Dire Hunger (Sp.)
No Direct Threat From Russia – NATO (RT)
Germans Told To Prepare For Another War With Russia (RT)
Germany Can’t Afford Rearmament, Let Alone a ‘War’ With Russia (Sp.)
Davos Admits Possibility Of Ukraine Defeat (ZH)
Ukraine Spy Chief: Win “Not Even Conceivable” Without Mass Mobilization (ZH)
The German Establishment Wants To Ban AfD (Amar)
Pelosi’s J6 Committee Deleted Over 100 Encrypted Files (PB)
No One Is Safe in an Era of Kafkaesque Absurdity (Brooks)
Mayorkas Says Border Is Secure But Biden Says It Isn’t (MN)
Supreme Court Rules Texas Must Replace Barbed Wire With Giant Red Carpet (BBee)
Supreme Court Rules It’s Illegal For National Guard To Guard Nation (BBee)

 

 


New Hampshire Governor Sununu’s home town.

 

 

Vivek

 

 

Tucker Canada
https://twitter.com/i/status/1749645597827887333

 

 

Tucker Rand Paul

 

 

Fani
https://twitter.com/i/status/1749817785122013580

 

 

Kash Patel
https://twitter.com/i/status/1749514005725475192

 

 

Trump Jan 22

 

 

Kari Lake

 

 

Trump hotel jobs
https://twitter.com/i/status/1749671123778748611

 

 

 

 

Time for dirty tricks?!

Trump ‘Honored’ By New Hampshire Win, Says Republican Party ‘Very United’ (Fox)

Former President Trump said he is “very honored” by his New Hampshire primary win Tuesday night, telling Fox News Digital that the Republican Party is “very united” behind his candidacy. Trump won the first-in-the-nation primary Tuesday night, defeating former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Trump also won the Iowa caucuses last week. During an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital shortly after the race was called, Trump said he was honored. “I’m very honored by the result,” Trump said. Trump also said he is “looking forward to going against the worst president in the history of our country.” New Hampshire – where independent voters who make up roughly 40% of the electorate can vote in either major party’s contest and have long played an influential role in the state’s storied presidential primary – was considered fertile ground for Haley.

And Haley spent plenty of time and resources in the state, securing the influential endorsement of popular Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. But Trump dominated for a second week in a row, cruising to victory in both critical early voting states. When asked if he felt Haley would suspend her campaign, he said, “I don’t know. She should.” “She should because, otherwise, we have to keep wasting money instead of spending on Biden,” Trump said. “If she doesn’t drop out, we have to waste money instead of spending it on Biden, which is our focus.” Trump, who was joined at a rally Monday night in New Hampshire by his former opponents who then endorsed him, including Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota, said the party is united.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended his campaign on Sunday and endorsed Trump. “The party is very united except for her,” Trump said. “The party is very united, and we’re looking forward to going against the worst president in the history of our country,” he said. But Haley, during a speech after the race was called, noted that she got close to half of the vote in New Hampshire. She said she is “the last one standing next to Donald Trump” and added that the race is “far from over.” “New Hampshire is the first in the nation, not the last,” Haley said. She is now looking ahead to South Carolina’s primary on Feb. 24.

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“..Netanyahu understands the importance of these strategic relations with Cairo and he will not damage those ties..”

Israel Risks Dragging Egypt Into War (Blade)

It’s been more than a hundred days since Israel kicked off its Iron Swords operation in Gaza following the bloody attack of October 7, when more than 1,200 Israelis were brutally murdered at the hands of Hamas militants. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to punish those responsible for the massacre, which also left more than 5,000 people wounded. He further promised to eliminate the Islamic group that controls Gaza, and to de-militarize the enclave that has posed a threat to Israel’s security. But more than three months down the line, officials in West Jerusalem still seem to be scratching their heads over how to achieve those goals. The main challenge is the continuous flow of arms, technology, and money to Gaza, from which the militants of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad continue to fire rockets. And Israel believes it is coming from the Sinai Peninsula, smuggled through the border via the so-called Philadelphi Route.

The term emerged in 1982 following the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and the subsequent demarcation of the border. According to that agreement, both sides deployed troops on their respective sides along the 14km line, a move that promised stability and security. But several years later, in 1987, during the First Intifada, Palestinians started digging tunnels under the axis, through which they smuggled goods and weapons, as well as militants and money. By 2005, when Israel evacuated its 17 settlements from Gaza and handed over control of the axis to the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic group already had hundreds of such tunnels, and their numbers continued to grow – especially after Hamas seized power in the enclave in 2007. “Initially, Egypt didn’t exert any significant efforts into stopping that smuggling, simply because it brought a lot of economic benefits to both sides,” said Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism.

“It was during this time that Hamas boosted its arms arsenal, smuggling in weapons, money and technologies. It was also then, when Iranian and Hezbollah experts and technicians arrived in Gaza and taught Hamas engineers on how to develop their own industry,” he added. Then, in 2011, came the Arab Spring. The long-term ruler of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, was deposed, and the radical elements in Sinai started rearing their heads. Terror attacks have become a regular phenomenon, especially after 2014, when Daesh (Islamic State/IS) took control over most jihadist groups on the peninsula, establishing the so-called Wilayat Sinai. “These groups were against the newly established government of President Abdel Fattah A-Sisi. They were targeting the army and killing civilians across the country, so Cairo came to realize that there was cooperation between Hamas and those terrorists and it decided to break that link,” said Karmon.

Over the years, Cairo exerted multiple efforts into fighting the threat emanating from Sinai. It boosted its military presence on the peninsula, launched counterterrorism operations, and flooded hundreds of tunnels that linked Gaza to Egypt. But experts in Israel believe not all the loopholes were eliminated. Even more so, they are still being used to smuggle militants, weapons, and potentially Israeli hostages. This is why in recent weeks, a number of Israeli politicians, including Netanyahu, have stated that the Philadelphi Route should be recaptured, with Israel establishing full control over the territory. Karmon maintains Israel has no intention of occupying the area. Instead, the idea is that his country would just beef up its military presence in the region to maintain security. “Recapturing the area would be very difficult to execute, simply because we have a peace agreement with Egypt. Of course, there are right-wing voices who are calling for the occupation of Gaza or the building of settlements there, but Netanyahu understands the importance of these strategic relations with Cairo and he will not damage those ties,” the expert asserted.

However, in Egypt some are still worried. Hany Soliman, executive director of the Arab Center for Research and Studies (ACRS) in Cairo, says Netanyahu’s words are backed by actions. These include negotiations with the Americans on the construction of an underground wall on the Egyptian side. The project, which promises to be 1km deep and 13km long, will be equipped with sensors and other technology, enabling digging to be detected, and as such deterring radicals from trying their luck. The project is set to be funded by the US. But the possibility of such an endeavor taking place depends largely on the will of the Egyptians, says Soliman, and they might not want to rush it. “Firstly, on the political and security levels, Egypt will not sign such a protocol, especially at a time when there is a lack of clarity on Israeli intentions and when there are concerns about Israeli attempts to pass and impose their displacement plan,” he said. “And, secondly, let’s not forget the Palestinian Authority. It has full rights to object to this project. They can claim that the occupation of the Philadelphi axis is inconsistent with the Oslo Accords and that it infringes on their sovereignty”.

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“During the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year, we will try to do everything possible for Egypt to effectively integrate into the work of the group..”

Russia Will Do Everything to Integrate Egypt Into BRICS – Putin (Sp.)

Russia expects that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi will attend the BRICS summit in Russia’s Kazan scheduled for later in the year, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday. “We are waiting for you, dear Mr. Sisi, at the unification summit [of BRICS] in Kazan in October this year,” Putin said during the ceremony of the start of the construction of the fourth power unit of Dabaa nuclear power plant (NPP). Russia has planned more than 200 BRICS events, and Moscow expects that representatives of Egypt will take an active part in them, the president said. “New promising opportunities for building up our fruitful cooperation are opening up in connection with Egypt’s accession to the BRICS. I would like to emphasize that from the very beginning, Russia sincerely supported the desire of the Egyptian side to become a full member of this association. During the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year, we will try to do everything possible for Egypt to effectively integrate into the work of the group,” Putin said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi launched on Tuesday the construction of the fourth power unit of the Dabaa nuclear power plant (NPP) in Egypt via videoconference. Pouring the first concrete into the foundation of the building where the nuclear reactor will be located means the start of the construction of the entire new power unit. After this, the project will be implemented to full capacity — all four blocks of the nuclear power plant will be built simultaneously. Speaking about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict during the launching ceremony, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that he is in constant contact with his Egyptian counterpart on the issue.

“And in general, Sisi and I are in constant contact … we regularly discuss all the most significant issues on the international and regional agenda for our countries. In particular, we exchange opinions and coordinate positions in connection with the tragic development of the situation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and resolve issues of a humanitarian nature,” Putin said during the ceremony to launch the construction of the fourth power unit of the Dabaa nuclear power plant.

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“..catastrophic hunger. Intense fighting, access denials & restrictions + communications blackouts..”

UN Agency Says 570,000 People in Gaza Strip Face Dire Hunger (Sp.)

About 570,000 people in the Gaza Strip face dire hunger, and the work of humanitarian organizations is difficult due to access and communication problems, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) said on Tuesday. “570,000 people in Gaza face catastrophic hunger. Intense fighting, access denials & restrictions + communications blackouts are hampering UNRWA’s ability to safely & effectively deliver aid. As risk of famine grows, UN calls for a critical increase in humanitarian access,” the UNRWA said on X . On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a large-scale rocket attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip, while its fighters breached the border and opened fire on the military and civilians.

As a result, more than 1,200 people were killed in Israel and some 240 others were kidnapped. Israel launched retaliatory strikes, ordered a complete blockade of Gaza, and launched a ground invasion of the Palestinian enclave with the stated goal of eliminating Hamas fighters and rescuing the hostages. More than 25,000 people have been killed in Gaza so far as a result of the Israeli attacks, according to local officials. On November 24, Qatar brokered an agreement between Israel and Hamas for a temporary ceasefire and the exchange of some prisoners and hostages, as well as the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza. The truce was extended several times and expired on December 1.

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“At the same time, he stressed that the bloc nevertheless “closely monitors what Russia does”..”

No Direct Threat From Russia – NATO (RT)

NATO sees no threat from Russia toward any of its members, the US-led bloc’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters on Tuesday during a press conference in Brussels. His comments come as several countries, including Germany and the Baltic states, have raised concerns of a potential future Russian attack. Answering questions from journalists following the signing of major new investments in artillery ammunition productions, Stoltenberg stated that, “We don’t see any direct or imminent threat against any NATO ally.” At the same time, he stressed that the bloc nevertheless “closely monitors what Russia does” and has increased its “vigilance and presence in the eastern part of the alliance,” in order to prevent any attacks on allied nations.

Meanwhile, German news outlets have reported in recent weeks that Berlin was preparing for a scenario in which Russia launches an “open attack” on NATO as early as the summer of 2025 after securing a major victory in Ukraine. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius also warned on Monday that his country should be ready to respond to a possible Russian attack even though there is no real threat as of now. “Deterrence is the only effective means of positioning oneself against an aggressor from the outset,” Pistorius told ZDF, calling on Germany and its NATO allies to commit to strengthening their military capabilities. Similar concerns have been voiced by other NATO members, such as Estonia, whose Prime Minister Kaja Kallas suggested last week that the bloc has three to five years to prepare for a possible direct confrontation with Russia.

Moscow has dismissed any claims that it intends to attack any NATO members as “complete nonsense,” with President Vladimir Putin arguing that Russia has “no geopolitical, economic … or military interest” in doing so. At the same time, the Kremlin has for decades voiced concerns that it was the US and its NATO allies’ continuous expansion to the east that posed an existential threat to Russia. Moscow has cited this expansion, which it believes threatens its national security, as well as the refusal to rule out Ukrainian NATO membership in the future, as some of the key reasons for launching its offensive against Kiev in February 2022.

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There are more EU countries that tell these absurd stories.

Germans Told To Prepare For Another War With Russia (RT)

Germany should be ready to respond to a possible Russian attack, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has warned. He said that to prepare for such a scenario, Germany and its NATO allies must commit to strengthening their military capabilities. In an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF on Monday, the defense chief pointed out that while Germany is not currently under a direct threat of attack, the country should do its best to be prepared for it. If Germany wants to be ready for an attack “that you don’t know if and when it will occur, then that means you have to arm yourself – and that’s what we’re currently doing together with allies in NATO,” he explained.

Pistorius went on to say that “deterrence is the only effective means of positioning oneself against an aggressor from the outset” as it signals to a potential adversary that the target is capable of striking back. To achieve such a posture, however, Germany must have “a credible deterrent” and be able to “wage a war that is forced upon us,” he noted. Commenting on a potential scenario in which Russia attacked the Baltics, Pistorius remarked that Berlin was setting up its “Lithuania Brigade” specifically to address those concerns. The unit, composed of about 4,800 soldiers is expected to be ready by 2027 and will be the first German force to be permanently stationed abroad since World War II. Pistorius suggested that amid the Ukraine conflict it would take Russia at least several years to be ready for a full-scale offensive, and that Western countries should use the time to intensively arm themselves.

The German tabloid Bild reported earlier this month, citing a classified document, that Germany is preparing for a scenario in which Russia launches an “open attack” on NATO in mid-2025, following major victories in Ukraine. Moscow mocked the prediction as a “zodiac forecast.” Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed claims that Russia could attack NATO as “complete nonsense,” arguing that Moscow has “no geopolitical, economic… or military interest” in doing so. Still, the Kremlin has for decades voiced concerns about the US-led military bloc’s expansion towards Russian borders, viewing it as an existential threat.

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“Not only is Germany’s justification for rearmament in question but also the nation’s ability to afford it..”

Germany Can’t Afford Rearmament, Let Alone a ‘War’ With Russia (Sp.)

Germany must take into account the possibility of a military conflict with Russia and prepare for it over the next three-five years, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius told ZDF on January 22. He insisted that the German Bundeswehr armed forces should become “a credible deterrent,” and that a German combat brigade would be deployed in the Baltics to become “fully combat-ready” by 2027. In December, Pistorius signed an agreement for the permanent deployment of a Bundeswehr brigade to Lithuania. and announced that the reintroduction of compulsory military service in Germany is now on the table. Does Russia really present an imminent threat to German national security? “If you ask me, and if you ask most people in my party, the answer is unequivocally no,” Gunnar Beck, Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who is currently Vice-President of the Identity & Democracy Group in the Parliament, told Sputnik.

“Ever since 1990, at the end of the Soviet Union, the Russian government has gone out of its way to intensify economic relations between Russia and Germany. We had extremely favorable energy contracts with Russia. And Russia was a growing export market for our agricultural and industrial goods. It’s due to our government’s policy, vis-a-vis Ukraine conflict that relations with Russia are now almost at an all time low. So, on the one hand, I think, German policy and EU policy has been a provocation. Nonetheless, I think that the Russian reaction to the sanctions in particular has been tough, but at the same time measured. So in my view, Russia is no immediate security threat to Germany. Categorically not.” Not only is Germany’s justification for rearmament in question but also the nation’s ability to afford it, according to Beck. German industry is in a dire state as a result of the government’s policies, he stressed.

“Germany currently finds itself in what is probably the most serious economic crisis since the Second World War,” Beck said. “The government’s policies (…) are affecting all leading branches of German industry, which is suffering from high inflation, lack of qualified labor, bureaucracy and high tax levels. As a result, our exports have declined significantly. So we are in crisis, and German industry, which has always been the backbone of German prosperity, in particular, is in crisis.” He listed three major reasons for the new talk of militarization: First, the German government’s energy and climate change policy; Second, unprecedented migration into Germany from outside Europe of unskilled workers and the astronomical cost to German public finances; Third, Germany’s policies on Ukraine and sanctions imposed on the Russian economy.

Berlin’s decision to follow Washington’s lead and slap sweeping sanctions on Russia has backfired on Germans on a much greater scale than on any of their Russian counterparts, according to the politician. “In my view, Germany is in no fit state economically and financially to embark upon a massive rearmament program,” Beck said. “If the German government seriously did so, the consequence would be a further significant worsening of the economic crisis. The only way to finance such rearmament would be through a complete reversal of all the other policies and massive remigration of migrants from Germany. The government has given no indication that it is prepared to do so. In other words, I think these declarations are probably largely symbolic. Germany simply cannot afford it.”

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“The situation is becoming undeniable and the fact that the elites are allowing discussion about a Ukraine loss suggests that defeat might be closer than we know..”

Davos Admits Possibility Of Ukraine Defeat (ZH)

In a move that would have been unthinkable a year ago, the WEF has formed a discussion panel at their annual Davos conference titled “What If Ukraine Loses?” The panel represents, at the very least, an admission by the globalists that Ukraine could be defeated by Russia despite the deluge of money, armaments and intel assets that Ukraine has been given access to by western governments.Since 2022, the narrative has shifted from talk of complete victory over Russia including the retaking of the Donbas and even Crimea, to merely holding the current front and keeping a steady supply of ammo and recruits. The realities on the ground cannot be denied. The long vaunted “counter-offensive” that was supposed to crush Russian forces was a complete failure. No significant ground was gained and no significant victories have been won. It was a considerable propaganda error to hype up the counter-offensive the way Ukraine did, because when it turned out to be a dud all their other claims quickly came under suspicion.

At the end of 2023, the average age of Ukrainian soldiers was older than 40 (compare this to the US where the average age is 27). Rumors out of Ukraine abound that most younger soldiers are dead and that collection teams (government enforcers) now prowl the streets of cities like Kiev. They search for and kidnap any fighting age men they find, only to send them to the front with little or no training. These are the kinds of stories that go mostly ignored by the wider western media. When they are mentioned, it is usually in support of the Ukrainian government, chastising people who don’t want to fight and die in a globalist proxy war as “draft dodgers.” The level to which journalists have acted as a propaganda arm of NATO and Ukraine has been grotesque, but it does help to explain why so many Americans and Europeans were deluded about the war for so long. All they have heard about for the past two years is that Ukraine is on the verge of imminent victory.

It’s simply not true. This is likely why the WEF is now forced to address the issue at Davos – The situation is becoming undeniable and the fact that the elites are allowing discussion about a Ukraine loss suggests that defeat might be closer than we know. The panel itself is largely made up of Ukrainian representatives who are there to spin the facts, not have a frank discussion about the realities in the trenches. Journalist Niall Ferguson seems to be the only member with a modicum of honesty on the panel, as he admits the situation in Ukraine has degraded dramatically. He does, however, join with the Ukrainians in admonishing the American public’s growing opposition to monetary and military support. The underlying message? If Ukraine loses, it will be your fault.

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Make peace you fools.

Ukraine Spy Chief: Win “Not Even Conceivable” Without Mass Mobilization (ZH)

“The shortage [of manpower] is palpable,” Ukraine’s military top spy chief, Lieutenant General Kyrylo Budanov, told Financial Times in a new interview, describing the most pressing situation facing the country after nearly two years of war.He warned that “it is not even conceivable to think that we can do without mobilization” — which reflects the consensus of the military’s leadership, and strongly points to staggering losses by the Ukrainian side, though an official running casualty count has never been revealed. Russia has also likely suffered immense losses, but can tap into much greater manpower and artillery, which is also allegedly being supplied from such nefarious actors as North Korea. As part of its report, FT has reviewed that Zelensky recently revealed that his army chiefs requested him “to mobilize about 400,000 to 500,000 new soldiers to replace those killed or wounded, and to rest those involved in the most intense fighting.”

Still, Budanov tried to paint an optimistic picture at a moment that even mainstream US press has lamented the current state of the war as a total failure and disaster for Ukraine: Ukrainian troops never managed to decisively breach Russia’s heavily fortified defences: the frontline remains almost the same as it looked a year ago. But Budanov maintains he was not wrong. “Although the original plans suggested something different, we kept our promise. This summer, our units repeatedly entered Crimea,” he said, referring to his commandos sneaking on to the peninsula to carry out raids on Russian bases. Not only have Ukrainian operatives done brief but ineffective raids into Crimea, but the last several weeks have seen stepped-up cross border drone and rocket attacks against Russian border regions, particularly targeting Belgorod city, resulting in dozens of casualties over months of sporadic waves of strikes.

Many war analysts have looked upon these attacks on Russian territory as a sign of increasing desperation. The Ukrainian strikes have been focused on civilian areas of Belgorod, and have little or no strategic value, but is more an act of ‘revenge’ and perhaps part of seeking to impose a “cost” on the Russian population in hopes of pressuring the Putin government. Kiev has been mulling a new mass mobilization since at least December, when media reports first cited Zelensky as saying, “This is a serious number,” while explaining further he has to look at more arguments to support this direction.” He added at the time, “I need concrete information on what will (then) happen with the one-million military of Ukraine,” according to The Kyiv Independent.

Any new mass mobilization is likely to be met with fierce pushback among the population and some government officials. Already there have been signs of fracture within the government over what to do as it’s increasingly clear Ukrainian forces are ‘losing’ – especially in manpower, arms, and ammo. Zelensky’s security services and military recruiters have also been accused of abusing their power under martial law, also amid allegations of corruption, with The New York Times having previously reported Ukrainian army recruiters have become “increasingly aggressive in their efforts to replenish the ranks, in some cases pulling men off the streets and whisking them to recruiting centers using intimidation and even physical force.” There have even been reports of men with diagnosed mental disabilities being subjected to attempted drafts. Currently, men ages 18-60 may be mobilized and still have no right to leave Ukraine, per the stipulations under martial law.

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On its way to first place.

The German Establishment Wants To Ban AfD (Amar)

With really bad ideas, you can often ask two pertinent questions. First, why will it not work? Second, why would it be harmful if it did? That rule holds in Germany, where the really bad idea of banning the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is currently getting much debate. The background of this debate is simple. Founded a decade ago, the AfD has established itself as a lasting feature of the political landscape. A populist right-wing party (roughly comparable to, for instance, the Austrian FPÖ), it brings together politicians and voters across a spectrum of positions. In the AfD, this spectrum ranges from very solidly conservative to far right. Still comparatively small, the AfD is significant. With currently just over 40,000 members, it holds 78 of 736 seats in the Bundestag, the central parliament in Berlin.

Importantly, it is also well-represented in 14 of 16 regional parliaments, where it occupies 242 seats of 1898 (for all regional legislatures taken together). In terms of its impact on national debates, it clearly punches far above this quantitative weight. Most importantly, however, the AfD is on a roll, on both the central and regional levels. If Germans were to vote for the Bundestag now – and thus in effect the chancellor’s office – the AfD would net 23%. That can be compared with the traditional center-left SPD, leading the hapless coalition government, at 14%. All parties from the ruling coalition (SPD, Greens, and the market-liberal FDP) together muster just 31% approval. On the regional level, the picture is largely the same, with particularly pronounced AfD advances in the area of the former East Germany.

For the Land of Brandenburg, for instance, a poll has the AfD in the lead with 28%, easily beating both the CDU mainstream conservatives (18%) and the SPD (17%). Adding insult to injury, AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla is also surpassing the SPD’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz on the personal-popularity scale, which is admittedly a low bar, as Scholz has managed to become one of the most disliked German politicians ever. No wonder that Germany’s under-qualified and somewhat hysterical minister of the economy, Robert Habeck, in whose head all of Russia seems to live rent-free, is publicly hallucinating that the AfD wants to make Germany like Russia. (The irony is, of course, is that with Habeck’s own mismanaged ministerial portfolio, quite a few Germans would welcome having Russia’s growth rates.)

Such rhetoric, as well as the timing of when the idea of an AfD ban is being floated, betrays the fact that the attempt to popularize the idea of outlawing the AfD is an opportunistic response to its increasing electoral clout, which of course cannot be openly admitted. So, those in favor of a ban argue that the AfD is an extremist party. But crucially here, extremism has a specific, legally (and narrowly) defined meaning. According to the German Constitution (Article 21.2), the Constitutional Court (and only that court) can prohibit a party when it substantially endangers the constitutional order of the Federal Republic or its existence itself. An important and often overlooked caveat, is it is not enough for a party to display hostility to the constitutional order. A prohibition is only an option if the party does so in an “active-combative, aggressive manner,” as Germany’s Ministry of the Interior puts it.

Only two parties have ever been banned, a far-right one in 1952 and a far-left one in 1956. Other attempts to proscribe parties (or to be precise, the same party) have also failed twice: In 2003 and again in 2017, the Constitutional Court refused to outlaw the very far-right NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands).

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Half the “evidence” is gone. How convenient.

Pelosi’s J6 Committee Deleted Over 100 Encrypted Files (PB)

It has been confirmed that the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 deleted more than 100 encrypted files from their investigation just days before Republicans gained control of the House. The House Administration Committee’s Oversight Subcommittee, chaired by Republican Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, is conducting an inquiry into January 6, 2021. The panel is looking at the security shortcomings that day, as well as the “actions” of the previous select committee investigating the Capitol riot. Loudermilk told Fox News Digital last week that his inquiry has entered a “new phase” with increased backing from House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) who has pledged extra resources to the panel’s investigation. According to sources familiar with Loudermilk’s investigation, the former J6 select committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) was required by House rules to turn over all documents from its investigation to the new, GOP-led panel after Republicans took control of the House of Representatives following the 2022 midterm elections.

According to Fox News Digital, Thompson promised Loudermilk that the J6 select committee would give over four terabytes of archival material, but the new committee got just around two terabytes. Loudermilk’s committee hired a digital forensics outfit to search hard drives for material they were not provided. According to people familiar with the investigation, the forensics team discovered 117 files that had been erased and encrypted. The sources revealed that the files were erased on January 1, 2023, just days before Thompson’s staff was scheduled to transmit the material to the new committee. The forensics team has successfully retrieved all 117 deleted and encrypted files. Loudermilk is now requesting answers and passwords to get access to the material. Loudermilk issued to Thompson asking access to his forensic team’s retrieved digital data.

“As you acknowledged in your July 7, 2023 letter, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (Select Committee) did not archive all Committee records as required by House Rules,” Loudermilk wrote. “You wrote that you sent specific transcribed interviews and depositions to the White House and Department of Homeland Security but did not archive them with the Clerk of the House.” Loudermilk added that Thompson “claimed that you turned over 4-terabytes of digital files, but the hard drives archived by the Select Committee with the Clerk of the House contain less than 3- terabytes of data.” The Republican Congressman said that after doing a forensic study of the data and archived hard drives, he was able to retrieve “numerous digital records from hard drives archived by the Select Committee.”

“One recovered file disclosed the identity of an individual whose testimony was not archived by the Select Committee,” Loudermilk wrote. “Further, we found that most of the recovered files are password-protected, preventing us from determining what they contain.” Loudermilk requested that Thompson provide him “a list of passwords for all password-protected files created by the Select Committee” so that his committee could “access these files and ensure they are properly archived.” Meanwhile, the congressman sent letters to the White House general counsel and the General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, asking for “unedited and unredacted transcripts” of White House and DHS testimony before the old select committee. Loudermilk’s committee is aware that transcripts of these interviews exist, but claims they were not given over by the Thompson-led investigation.

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“..the man Americans elected as the 45th president—and his team members—has been subjected to more bizarre allegations, secret investigations, partisan impeachments, preposterous indictments, and prejudiced legal proceedings than even Kafka could have imagined..”

No One Is Safe in an Era of Kafkaesque Absurdity (Brooks)

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.”—Franz Kafka, “The Trial.”

In Kafka’s early-20th-century novel, a reputable bank clerk is caught up in a prosecutorial nightmare. The story of Josef K. begins when court authorities suddenly arrive at his residence to tell him he’s to be indicted, but they can’t or won’t explain the exact nature of the charges against him. Josef K.’s accusers leave him with feelings of apprehension and anxiety. Throughout the novel, he struggles to defend himself within a hostile and complex legal process. At the end of the story, he’s led away to a summary execution. During the entire ordeal, the accused never really understands the reasons behind his mysterious prosecution. This dark story about the destruction of an innocent man led to the term “Kafkaesque” entering the English language as a way to describe situations in which honorable people are threatened by unfounded allegations. Kafka had a special talent for identifying the convergence between reality and absurdity.

A hundred years after “The Trial” was first published, the West has descended into an era in which absurd allegations are the new normal. In the Rainbow Reichs of the woke, witch hunting has become the order of the day.
One of the most notorious Kafkaesque events in modern history developed around the unforeseen political success of President Donald J. Trump.Over recent years, the man Americans elected as the 45th president—and his team members—has been subjected to more bizarre allegations, secret investigations, partisan impeachments, preposterous indictments, and prejudiced legal proceedings than even Kafka could have imagined. President Trump has endured some of the most savage and desperate partisan assaults in U.S. history. Despite it all, he has retained the loyalty of legions of ordinary citizens and is the leading candidate for reelection in 2024. Individuals throughout North America are praying that President Trump’s landslide victory in Iowa will lead to a decisive victory for the “Make America Great Again” movement.

[..] Few drag queen story hours feature the novels of Kafka, but the author’s insights remain valuable. Kafka understood that corrupt authorities have the capacity to ruin almost anyone they disapprove of. “The Trial” shows how Orwellian legal institutions can isolate individuals, make them appear guilty, and render them helpless. So far, President Trump has overcome the moral failures of the American judicial system, and he has an excellent chance of winning back the White House in 2024. Donald T. isn’t likely to suffer the same fate as Kafka’s Josef K. Francine C.’s future is considerably less certain. Without political support, financial resources, and professional help, challenges to the left by intrepid citizens are unlikely to continue. That’s why the suffocating nature of our Kafkaesque culture must be forthrightly resisted by honorable men and women.

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“The president’s been clear, he’s been clear that we need to move on the border, he needs resources to deal with the situation at the border.”s

Mayorkas Says Border Is Secure But Biden Says It Isn’t (MN)

During the White House press briefing Monday, a reporter asked Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to explain why Joe Biden and DHS head Alejandro Mayorkas give conflicting answers when asked if the border is secure or not. As we highlighted, last Friday Biden admitted that the border is not secure and stated that has has not believed it has been secure for a decade, despite the fact that Mayorkas has stated and testified multiple times that he believes the border is secure. “On Friday, President Biden said that he does not believe the border is secure, which is different from what Secretary Mayorkas has testified multiple times on the hill, why do they have two different views of the security of the border?” the reporter asked during Monday’s briefing.

Jean-Pierre used the tired excuse that Biden is waiting on Congress to provide more funding for border security. “The president’s been clear, he’s been clear that we need to move on the border, he needs resources to deal with the situation at the border. That’s why they’re having this conversation at the Senate, on the senate level and that’s why he’s asking for more resources,” Jean-Pierre said, adding “There’s an issue at the border, we need to deal with it and we have to act now. There’s an urgent need to act now.” The claim that Biden is waiting for funding for more security is laughable considering that he is ordering Border Patrol to actively take down barriers erected by Texas state authorities and the National Guard:

Elsewhere during the briefing Monday, Fox News reporter Peter Doocy pointed out that “authorities in Fairfax County, Virginia, ignored an ICE detainer. They released an illegal immigrant from Honduras, who was charged with sexually assaulting a Virginia minor and production of sexual abuse material.” He then asked Jean-Pierre “Doesn’t that go to show that, as record numbers of people appear at the border, you guys have no idea what kind of people are coming into this country?” Jean-Pierre, of course, denied the charge and again blamed Congress. She also claimed that Biden has recently visited the border, when in reality he hasn’t been there for over a year, and even that only visit was little more than a pit stop.

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“..It says that in the Constitution somewhere. Like, in Section 3 Article B or whatever.”

Supreme Court Rules Texas Must Replace Barbed Wire With Giant Red Carpet (BBee)

In yet another 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that Texas must remove all barbed wire along the border and replace it with a massive, plush red carpet. “How will migrants be able to get in the country if there’s barbed wire in the way?” said a visibly confused Justice Sotomayor. “They might get hurt! An elegant red carpet makes much more sense. It’s soft and red and can helpfully point the way to gaps along our border and make our new migrants feel welcome. It says that in the Constitution somewhere. Like, in Section 3 Article B or whatever.”

The border patrol responded to the ruling immediately and is now hard at work cutting gaps in the barbed wire fence and rolling out a red carpet across the border. “Hooo boy! This is just like in the Hollywood picture shows!” said one officer while rolling out a carpet for a small band of Al Qaeda operatives and Somali pirates. “Welcome to America, friends! You’re all stars to us!” The ruling also specified that migrants be supplied with limousines, bodyguards, and expensive gift bags filled with face creams and jewelry. “It’s the least we could do,” said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “It says that in the fourth paragraph of the 38th Amendment, I’m pretty sure.” At publishing time, Texas Governor Greg Abbott had desperately attempted to deter migrants by lining the red carpet with bear traps.

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“Texas is being ordered to open its border completely and let millions of people flood the state and the rest of the country until everything Americans hold dear is left a smoldering ruin..”

Supreme Court Rules It’s Illegal For National Guard To Guard Nation (BBee)

In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has ruled that it’s now illegal for the Texas National Guard to guard Texas or the nation. “Using the National Guard to guard the nation is an egregious misuse of the National Guard,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sided with the majority. “When the federal government has decreed that the nation not be guarded so that millions of illegal immigrants will swarm the border and settle in cities across the nation to swing the 2024 presidential election for Biden, states have no right to disobey that decree by guarding their states.” As a result of the ruling, Texas is being ordered to open its border completely and let millions of people flood the state and the rest of the country until everything Americans hold dear is left a smoldering ruin. “It’s the compassionate thing to do,” said Jackson. At publishing time, the government had asked the National Guard to return to its normal task of fighting endless foreign wars.

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Excess deaths


https://twitter.com/i/status/1749923876920762767

 

 


One of the two remaining northern white rhinos in the world, guarded 24 hours a day.

 

 

Acorn

 

 

Chicken hypnosis

 

 

Owl

 

 


Pecteilis radiata is a species of orchid found in China, Japan, Korea and Russia. It is commonly known as the white egret flower. It is easily grown from tubers, and rewards you with blooms shaped like white birds with wings spread in flight.

 

 

Pi

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 012021
 
 January 1, 2021  Posted by at 10:23 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  21 Responses »


Claude Monet Boulevard des Capucines 1873

 

Pfizer Vaccine First To Receive Emergency Use Authorization From WHO (RT)
New Coronavirus Variant May Have Been In US Since October (G.)
The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb (Atl.)
World Faces COVID19 “Vaccine Apartheid” (IC)
Over 100 Republicans Will Challenge Electoral College Results (SAC)
Pence Asks Judge To End GOP Suit To Expand His Powers (JTN)
‘Keep The Light On,’ Scottish PM Sturgeon Tells EU (RT)
A Festive Message for 2021 (Varoufakis)
The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange (Greenwald)

 

 

 

 

But what does it do? It doesn’t protect you from infection, and it doesn’t protect others around you from your infection.

Pfizer Vaccine First To Receive Emergency Use Authorization From WHO (RT)

The first vaccine against the novel coronavirus approved for emergency use by the World Health Organization is Comirnaty COVID-19 mRNA one produced by Pfizer/BioNTech, the WHO has announced. The world health body announced the emergency approval on Thursday, as 2020 came to a close. Its Emergency Use Listing (EUL) will enable countries to expedite their own regulatory approval of the vaccine, and allow UNICEF and the Pan-American Health Organization to buy it for distribution, the WHO said. “This is a very positive step towards ensuring global access to [Covid]-19 vaccines,” Dr Mariângela Simão, WHO’s assistant-Director General for access to medicines and health products, said in a statement. She added that “an even greater global effort” is needed to come up with enough of a supply to meet the needs of “priority populations everywhere,” however. The WHO is “working night and day to evaluate other vaccines that have reached safety and efficacy standards,” said Simão, urging other developers to “come forward for review and assessment.”

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There are multiple variants.

New Coronavirus Variant May Have Been In US Since October (G.)

A coronavirus variant carrying some of the same mutations as the highly contagious British variant may have been in the US since October and already be widespread, a re-analysis of more than 2m tests suggests. Genome sequencing to confirm whether the variant observed in Americans is the same as the so-called B117 variant currently circulating in the UK is under way. Results are expected within days but the revelations have prompted fresh questions about where the altered virus originated, including a small possibility that it began in the US, not the UK, or elsewhere altogether. The variant has also been found in at least 17 countries, including South Korea, Spain, Australia and Canada.

“It wouldn’t be at all surprising if at least some of the cases were B117,” said Eric Topol, head of Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the research, but whose team confirmed a Californian case of the B117 variant on Wednesday. “It has probably been here for a while at low levels – but you don’t see it until you look for it.” The existence of a new and highly transmissible Sars CoV-2 variant was announced by the UK’s health secretary on 14 December, after Covid-testing laboratories reported that a growing number of their positive samples were missing a signal from one of the three genes their PCR tests use to confirm the presence of the virus.

Further sequencing revealed that such “S gene dropout” was the result of mutations in the gene encoding the spike protein which the virus uses to gain entry to human cells. The variant is thought to have been circulating in the UK since September. News of the new variant has led to multiple countries restricting travel from the UK – or in the case of the US, requiring travelers to show proof of a negative Covid-19 test to be allowed into the country. However, it has been detected this week in Colorado and California, and the suspicion is it may already be widespread. To investigate, scientists at the California-based DNA testing company Helix examined the prevalence of S gene dropout among 2 million of the Covid tests the company has processed in recent months.

They observed an increase in S gene dropout among positive samples since early October, when 0.25% of positive tests exhibited this pattern. This has since grown, hitting 0.5% on average last week – although in Massachusetts, which has the highest number of such samples, it currently stands at 1.85%, although no cases of the B117 variant have been announced in that state yet. Further analysis revealed mutations in some of the same regions of the S gene which are also present in the B117 variant – although full sequencing of the viral genome is needed to confirm whether this is indeed the same variant, or something else.

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A lot of assumptions.

The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb (Atl.)

A new variant of the coronavirus is spreading across the globe. It was first identified in the United Kingdom, where it is rapidly spreading, and has been found in multiple countries. Viruses mutate all the time, often with no impact, but this one appears to be more transmissible than other variants—meaning it spreads more easily. Barely one day after officials announced that America’s first case of the variant had been found in the United States, in a Colorado man with no history of travel, an additional case was found in California. There are still many unknowns, but much concern has focused on whether this new variant would throw off vaccine efficacy or cause more severe disease—with some degree of relief after an initial study indicated that it did not do either.

And while we need more data to feel truly reassured, many scientists believe that this variant will not decrease vaccine efficacy much, if at all. Health officials have started emphasizing the lack of evidence for more severe disease. All good and no cause for alarm, right? Wrong. A more transmissible variant of COVID-19 is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.

Increased transmissibility can wreak havoc in a very, very short time—especially when we already have uncontrolled spread in much of the United States. The short-term implications of all this are significant, and worthy of attention, even as we await more clarity from data. In fact, we should act quickly especially as we await more clarity—lack of data and the threat of even faster exponential growth argue for more urgency of action. If and when more reassuring data come in, relaxing restrictions will be easier than undoing the damage done by not having reacted in time.

To understand the difference between exponential and linear risks, consider an example put forth by Adam Kucharski, a professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who focuses on mathematical analyses of infectious-disease outbreaks. Kucharski compares a 50 percent increase in virus lethality to a 50 percent increase in virus transmissibility. Take a virus reproduction rate of about 1.1 and an infection fatality risk of 0.8 percent and imagine 10,000 active infections—a plausible scenario for many European cities, as Kucharski notes. As things stand, with those numbers, we’d expect 129 deaths in a month. If the fatality rate increased by 50 percent, that would lead to 193 deaths. In contrast, a 50 percent increase in transmissibility would lead to a whopping 978 deaths in just one month—assuming, in both scenarios, a six-day infection-generation time.

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Billions in profits.

World Faces COVID19 “Vaccine Apartheid” (IC)

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla recently heaped praise on “the almost 44,000 people who selflessly raised their hands to participate in our trial.” “Each of you has helped to bring the world one step closer to our shared goal of a potential vaccine to fight this devastating pandemic,” Bourla wrote in an open letter to volunteers who took part in Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine research, which was conducted in Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Germany, and Turkey as well as the U.S. His letter was published on November 9, the same day Pfizer announced that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective at preventing the disease, and Bourla laid this considerable accomplishment at the feet of the medical volunteers: “You are the true heroes, and the whole world owes you a tremendous debt of gratitude.”

But Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey will have to be satisfied with Pfizer’s gratitude, because (like most countries in the world) they won’t be receiving enough of the vaccine to inoculate their populations, at least not anytime soon. Meanwhile, the U.S. and Germany — along with Canada and the rest of the European Union — have contracted for enough doses of various Covid-19 vaccines to inoculate their populations several times over. While the U.S. is struggling with the logistics of its vaccine rollout — fewer than 3 million people have received the first dose so far — adequate supplies should eventually be available. The U.S. pre-purchased 100 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine for $1.95 billion in the summer (and reportedly passed on the opportunity to secure another 100 million doses).

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced a deal to buy another 100 million doses of the vaccine by July 2021, and the government has the option to purchase an additional 400 million doses. The U.S. has also purchased 200 million doses of the Moderna vaccine, which is also extremely effective against Covid-19. Those doses are due by the second quarter of 2021, and the government may buy up to 300 million more doses. And the U.S. has contracts for additional vaccine doses from Ology, Sanofi, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson, whose candidates are in earlier stages of development.

Pharmaceutical companies and individual executives are already profiting handsomely from their medical breakthroughs. On the same day that he sent his open letter, Bourla, whose net worth is estimated at more than $26 million, sold more than $5 million worth of his shares of Pfizer stock. Pfizer has already made an estimated $975 million from the vaccine this year and is expected to earn another $19 billion in revenue from the vaccine in 2021, according to Morgan Stanley. Pfizer’s profit margin on the vaccine is estimated at between 60 and 80 percent. Moderna is projected to make more than $10 billion from its vaccine next year.

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Of course they will.

Over 100 Republicans Will Challenge Electoral College Results (SAC)

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said Wednesday he believes more than 100 members of the GOP could challenge the Electoral College results when Congress certifies the electoral votes on Jan. 6. During an interview with Charlie Sykes on “The Bulwark Podcast,” Kinzinger said he thinks “upwards of 100” GOP lawmakers could challenge the Nov. 3 election results. “I hope I’m wrong,” Kinzinger said. “I’m guessing it could be upwards of 100.” He added, “I’m just over the undermining of democracy and the frankly massive damage that’s being done with this.” Joe Biden is expected to be certified as the 2020 presidential winner, but President Donald Trump has not conceded and is encouraging members of the GOP to challenge the results.


There has been an increasing number of GOP lawmakers who have said they will support Trump’s effort in overturning the election results, including most recently Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rep. Jefferson Van Drew (R-N.J.)
“Somebody has to stand up here,” Hawley said in an interview with Fox News Wednesday. “You’ve got 74 million Americans who feel disenfranchised, who feel like their vote doesn’t matter, and this is the one opportunity that I have as a United States senator, this process right here, my one opportunity to stand up and say something and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

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“An 1887 federal law known as the Electoral Count Act has the vice president presiding over the congressional meeting. However the suit led by Gohmert tries to invalidate the law as an unconstitutional constraint on the vice president’s authority..”

Pence Asks Judge To End GOP Suit To Expand His Powers (JTN)

Vice President Mike Pence asked a federal judge Thursday to reject an attempt by Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and other congressional Republicans to expand Pence’s official powers to allow him to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. The lawsuit was filed earlier this week and attempts to expand Pence’s role in Congress’ meeting Wednesday to count states’ electoral votes and certify Biden’s victory over Trump, according to The Hill newspaper. Pence argued in a filing Thursday to U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle that he was not the correct defendant to the suit.


“A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction,” a Justice Department attorney wrote in the filing, The Hill also reported. An 1887 federal law known as the Electoral Count Act has the vice president presiding over the congressional meeting. However the suit led by Gohmert tries to invalidate the law as an unconstitutional constraint on the vice president’s authority to choose among competing claims of victory when state-level election results are disputed. Republicans in several key battleground states have disputed Biden’s win and offered alternate “slates” of pro-Trump electors to be counted, also according to The Hill.

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WIll the UK fall apart next?

‘Keep The Light On,’ Scottish PM Sturgeon Tells EU (RT)

Within minutes of Brexit taking effect, Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon tweeted a message to Brussels that Scotland would be rejoining the EU “soon,” responding to recent demand for another independence referendum. “Scotland will be back soon, Europe. Keep the light on,” Sturgeon said as the clock struck midnight in Brussels and the UK’s exit from the European Union became official on Friday. The United Kingdom’s divorce from the continental bloc after 45 years of membership was the result of a protracted process following the 2016 referendum, which the Tory government expected would fail. Instead, a narrow majority in England and Wales backed Brexit, while Scotland overwhelmingly voted to remain – by 62 percent to 38 percent.

Sturgeon came to lead the Scottish National Party (SNP) after the failure of the first Scottish independence referendum, in 2014. Only 45 percent of Scots voted to leave the UK, with 55 percent choosing to remain, in part due to warnings from Brussels that an independent Scotland would not automatically become an EU member and would have to negotiate entry from scratch. That ratio has now been reversed, according to recent polls. Research by Ipsos MORI in October indicated that support for Scottish independence was at 58 percent – an all-time high. Other polls show support for secession at anywhere between 51 and 59 percent.

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“Because things are the way they are, things will not remain the way they are.”

A Festive Message for 2021 (Varoufakis)

I am Yanis Varoufakis with a message for the New Year from DiEM25. 2020 leaves behind much debris – pain, fear, broken lives, smashed dreams. But, we also owe a debt of gratitude to 2020: It has helped expose seven fundamental secrets. We used to think of governments as powerless. But since Covid-19 struck we know better: Governments have stupendous powers that they hitherto chose not to use, deferring to the exorbitant power of Big Business. Yes, the money-trey does exist after all. Except, of course, that is only harvested by the powerful on behalf of the oligarchy: Money created by the rich for the rich. Solvency is a political decision because power-politics, not markets, decide who is bankrupt and who is not.

Wealth has nothing to do with hard work or entrepreneurship. America’s billionaires made 931 billion dollars from the pandemic. They got richer in their sleep. Yes, 2020 was a vintage year for capitalists, but capitalism died! Liberated from any remaining competition, colossal platform companies like Amazon own everything. So, yes, during 2020, Capitalism morphed into an insidious Technofeudalism. Our Europe, its civilisation and power notwithstanding, continued to sell its soul in 2020. One word suffices: Moria, the refuges prison camp in Lesbos – a mirror reflecting Europe’s cruelty and lost soul.


Yes, it has been a difficult year. We lost too many people to the pandemic. We saw exploitation flourish, driving so many into the embrace of destitution. Civil liberties took a major hit. But, despite it all, 2020 let us in on a brilliant, hope-inspiring seventh secret: Everything could be different. If this pandemic proved anything, it is that Bertolt Brecht was right when he once said: Because things are the way they are, things will not remain the way they are. I can think of no greater source of hope than this. We must thank 2020 for it. Now, it is up to us to make 2021 a year of radical change in the interests of the many. Everywhere! Happy New Year and Carpe DiEM25!

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Assange may be in prison for many more years. Monday’s a big day. But after that, appeals are sure to follow.

The Kafkaesque Imprisonment of Julian Assange (Greenwald)

Persecution is not typically doled out to those who recite mainstream pieties, or refrain from posing meaningful threats to those who wield institutional power, or obediently stay within the lines of permissible speech and activism imposed by the ruling class. Those who render themselves acquiescent and harmless that way will — in every society, including the most repressive — usually be free of reprisals. They will not be censored or jailed. They will be permitted to live their lives largely unmolested by authorities, while many will be well-rewarded for this servitude. Such individuals will see themselves as free because, in a sense, they are: they are free to submit, conform and acquiesce. And if they do so, they will not even realize, or at least not care, and may even regard as justifiable, that those who refuse this Orwellian bargain they have embraced (“freedom” in exchange for submission) are crushed with unlimited force.


Those who do not seek to meaningfully dissent or subvert power will usually deny — because they do not perceive — that such dissent and subversion are, in fact, rigorously prohibited. They will continue to believe blissfully that the society in which they live guarantees core civic freedoms — of speech, of press, of assembly, of due process — because they have rendered their own speech and activism, if it exists at all, so innocuous that nobody with the capacity to do so would bother to try to curtail it. The observation apocryphally attributed to socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg, imprisoned for her opposition to German involvement in World War I and then summarily executed by the state, expresses it best: “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

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Nov 082020
 


David Hockney The Pond in Autumn 1 November 2020

 

Winner of Trump-Biden Race Will Be Determined By Courts (Jenna Ellis)
Nov. 7 – Biden Hasn’t Won Yet; Trump Has A Path(s) (McCann)
Life Under Biden (Jim Rickards)
Another Election Computer Glitch In Michigan Reversed (JTN)
The GOP Did Not Carry 71,000,000+ Votes, President Trump Did (sundance)
The Kafka Election: Finding a Way Out of the Maze (Miele)
Speedy COVID19 Healers Keep Producing Antibodies After Infection (F.)
The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test (Sacré)
The Narrative Problem After Peak Oil (Watkins)

 

 

Since the US had no official institution to call an election soon after the polls have closed, and people want a result fast, it has befallen on the media to make the announcement. And by and large, this hasn’t been that big a deal. But when those same media have for 4 years relentlessly hounded one of the two candidates, it should be obvious that this “system” should not be applied. If only because it has no legal status whatsoever.

However, people both in the US and abroad don’t appear to be aware of this. So when the New York Times et al declare a winner, this is seen as an “official” announcement. It is not. That won’t come until the Electoral College gathers in December (8-14th?!). And at least until then, Trump will have every right to contest the election in court. Still, “world leaders” are congratulating the “next president”. Do they really not know how this works?

The idea behind it all is obvious, of course: to make Trump look like a sore loser, and Biden the president-elect, a title the media claim they can bestow upon him. Do remember that both Biden’s and Kamala’s campaign were considered dead in the water at one point, before they were magically resurrected by the party machine, which ensured that two people very unpopular in their own party now lead the ticket. Be careful what you wish for.

In that light. I found this intriguing. Twitter adds a warning to this Trump tweet: “Official sources may not have called the race when this was Tweeted”. I haven’t seen one instance where they attached the same warning to tweets about Biden winning and being President Elect. But wouldn’t that be the same thing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

From one of Trump‘s lawyers.

Winner of Trump-Biden Race Will Be Determined By Courts (Jenna Ellis)

Despite projections by many news organizations Saturday that former Vice President Joe Biden has won the presidential election and defeated President Trump, the media don’t have the power to decide the outcome of American elections. Legal challenges by the Trump reelection campaign, where I serve as a legal adviser, are still before the courts and we await judicial rulings on our challenges. In other words, as the late baseball great Yogi Berra said in 1973, referring to the National League pennant race: “It ain’t over till it’s over.” We all want to know who will be president for the next four years. But all Americans should want accurate results above all, no matter who they supported in the race.

So it’s important for everyone to realize that Trump campaign legal challenges must be resolved in the courts before we have an official and legally binding decision on who won the 2020 presidential election. President Trump will continue fighting to ensure a fair and accurate election result. He is right to do this, because it’s vital that we keep our elections free and fair. As Americans, we should all be able to recognize that our rule of law governs and our election process works accurately. For President Trump, the Trump 2020 campaign and the Republican National Committee, the rule of law, fundamental fairness and accuracy in election results are the goals. None of the legal fights we are waging are novel arguments or anything more than an effort to ensure a fair and accurate election outcome.


Our nation went through a legal challenge to the results in Florida during the 2000 presidential election between then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush and then-Vice President Al Gore, for example. Twenty years ago, some news organizations prematurely said Gore won that very close election and would become the next president of the United States. Those news organizations later pulled back their projections. Legal challenges by the Bush campaign went all the way to the Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court determined that George W. Bush won the election. Imagine how different history would have turned out if Bush has simply thrown in the towel as soon as he heard someone on TV say Gore won the race.

Bill Binney

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Molly McCann is on Sidney Powell’s team.

Nov. 7 – Biden Hasn’t Won Yet; Trump Has A Path(s) (McCann)

The media called the election today, as many predicted would happen. As noted yesterday, the media and the Democrats were desperate to call it. They want to shift momentum to Biden and frame Trump as a sore loser, and worse, a despot attempting a coup. This election is still in play. Arizona is not fully in yet, and Trump continues to close his margin there. The latest results were still breaking for Trump with the margins he needs to close the gap and take the state. We’ll see. Georgia is going to go to a recount no matter what. Pennsylvania is a disaster zone…for the Democrats. I’m not sure if the 100,000 provisional ballots have been counted yet, but they hadn’t been counted when they called the election for Biden. Those could swing Trump back into the lead in PA. There is still so much at play. Are we looking at razor-thin margins? Yes. Has Biden won yet? No. If we could hold Georgia and Arizona outright, I think we could knock out Pennsylvania at SCOTUS. This is the actual electoral map right now:

So, does Trump have a path forward? Yes. First of all, Trump could still win in a relatively traditional manner. Because remember, even though the media is demanding Trump concede, recounts in elections happen with relative regularity. People contest results and we go through processes to make sure everything is above board. 2020 is election insanity on an unprecedented scale (I think), but procedurally, this is not some crazy aberration in politics or elections. So, Trump might still be able to win traditionally, and I pray he does. But it might take more than that.


If we lose Arizona and Georgia and Pennsylvania, then Trump will have to kick it up a notch. He’ll need to block certification and pursue more aggressive measures to win. It should go without saying that I am advocating legal aggressive measures, but given the present circumstances, perhaps best to clarify. I hope he pursues some of those options sooner rather than later.

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“Biden is running for president in name only. He has never been that bright. He has accomplished little in his almost fifty years in public service. He is physically frail and clearly suffering acute cognitive decline.”

Life Under Biden (Jim Rickards)

This was a historic, turning-point election. Turning-point elections are the most historic because they put the country on a different path: Party Politics in 1800, Populism in 1828, Civil War in 1860, Liberalism in 1932, and Conservatism in 1980. Every 100 years, America gets a president who shakes the establishment and cleans out the Washington sewers. In the 1800s it was Andrew Jackson. In the 1900s it was Teddy Roosevelt. In the 2000s, it’s Donald Trump. There is no doubt that Trump and Biden would lead America in almost opposite directions with profound consequences for the future of the country and for future elections. If Trump had won, we would have gotten more of the same, which is saying a lot.

Trump would offer more tax cuts (or at least preserve the tax cuts we’ve received). He’d offer less regulation, a major accomplishment of his first term. Trump would continue the trade war with China and expand it in ways that would move jobs back to the United States (or at least get them out of China into friendlier countries such as Vietnam and India). He would also curtail Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property and cut off Chinese tech investment in the United States. Trump has also stopped foreign installation of sensitive 5G telecommunications systems from Huawei and ZTE, which are hidden arms of the Chinese military. Trump built alliances to constrain Chinese expansion efforts. His main breakthrough was the Quad Alliance of the U.S., Japan, Australia and India that effectively surrounds and can interdict China’s sea lanes to the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Trump also made great strides toward Middle East peace with the first two Israeli-Arab peace treaties in twenty-five years – one with the UAE and one with Bahrain. Other peace treaties with Israel may have followed. Finally, Trump was imposing crippling sanctions on Iran that would have forced it to negotiate in good faith on its nuclear program or crush its economy in ways that would also impede its efforts at terrorism and nuclear weapons. With Trump, what you see is what you get: Lower taxes, less regulation, more jobs, no new wars, peace in the Middle East, and peace through strength in confronting Iran and China. With four more years, Trump could have accomplished his goals and perhaps be ranked among the ten most significant presidents of all time.

Biden is another matter entirely. First of all, Biden is running for president in name only. He has never been that bright. He has accomplished little in his almost fifty years in public service. He is physically frail and clearly suffering acute cognitive decline. If Joe Biden does win, he’ll be 78 years old when sworn in and 82 years old at the end of his first term. Both marks are the oldest in U.S. history for a president. Some individuals are still sharp in their late 70s. Biden is not one of them. The result is that Biden will never be president de facto. With Trump out of the picture, Democrats wouldn’t need him anymore. Steps would be taken at some point to remove him from office on the grounds of mental incapacity under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. Nancy Pelosi recently proposed legislation to set up a commission to do just that as prescribed by the U.S. Constitution.

But while he remains in office, who will be the real president in a Biden administration? There are three camps contending for power: The first camp is the Biden family led by Joe Biden’s wife Dr. Jill Biden, his son Hunter Biden, and Joe Biden’s brothers Jim Biden and Frank Biden. These are the individuals who have been enriched through association with Joe Biden by using or selling access to Biden’s power to win lucrative investment management roles, consulting engagements, construction contracts and other remunerative pursuits. The Biden family will want to keep Joe in power (with Jill Biden pulling the strings) in order to keep their shakedown operation intact and avoid scrutiny.

The second camp is led by Kamala Harris and those who control her, including the Obama crew and the Resistance. If Biden is removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, Harris becomes Acting President. If Biden resigns under threat of removal, Harris becomes the president. She would be a front for the Obamas and Valerie Jarrett who would operate through a cabinet consisting of Obama family retainers including Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Sally Yates and Eric Holder.

The third camp is led by the extreme left wing of the party including Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (and The Squad), Elizabeth Warren and radical organizations such as BLM. This group is already embedded in the Biden campaign as part of a deal whereby Bernie Sanders agreed to end his primary campaign and endorse Joe Biden in exchange for Biden adopting most of the Sanders platform. The most likely outcome is that the Obama crew and the Bernie Bros will join forces and run the Biden family off the road. The Bidens will be allowed to keep their Chinese and Russian money and will not face any scrutiny or prosecution in exchange for going away quietly.

Healing- “burn down the Republican Party” – Jennifer Rubin

Read more …

“County Worker Reportedly Submitted Two Sets Of Absentee Ballots Twice”

Another Election Computer Glitch In Michigan Reversed (JTN)

A Michigan Republican received a welcome shock when his apparent loss at the polls was reversed due to the county’s fix of a “technical glitch” that originally had him losing the election. Adam Kochenderfer was originally declared the loser in his race against Democrat Melanie Hartman for a position on the Oakland County Board of Commissioners. The narrow race appeared to end with Hartman the winner by just 104 votes. Yet the county clerk soon discovered that a set of absentee ballots had actually been reported in the voter totals twice. Once the duplicate set was removed, Kochenderfer came out ahead by 1,127 votes.


“This is proof that our process of checks and balances works,” County Clerk Lisa Brown said after the discovery. “A methodical canvass is an essential tool to ensure an accurate count and precise results.” Kochenderfer’s was the second race in Michigan so far in which a glitch was revealed to have displayed the incorrect outcome of a race. An alleged software glitch in Antrim County, Michigan earlier this week incorrectly awarded thousands of winning votes to Joe Biden; a recount of ballots subsequently revealed Trump was the county winner.

Soros voting machines

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Can Trump set up that long-awaited third party?

The GOP Did Not Carry 71,000,000+ Votes, President Trump Did (sundance)

As the republican establishment contemplates positioning themselves amid President Trump’s resolute intent to highlight a 2020 election filled with with demonstrable fraud, they would be prudent to check their political ego. President Trump has created a movement and collected the largest factual constituency of voters in the nation. This is the hill we stand upon, there is no other fallback position. As of this writing the indefatigable leader of the MAGA movement gathered 71 million votes for his re-election, and still climbing. Subtract the fraudulent and manipulated ‘mail-in’ ballots from the Biden operation and you have a reality of 71 million MAGA army members staring toward an opposition front containing battalions of cardboard cutouts.

No amount of media spin is going to change the reality of that political landscape. Regardless of whether Donald Trump’s legal arsenal is able to overcome the entrenched media operations drum-beating a deafening noise to distract from the 2020 fraud, that MAGA army is solidly behind our leader…. so consider this: If President Trump takes that army into a new political party of his choosing, that new party is structurally set to lay waste to any candidate within both wings of the Democrat and Republican assembly. A Trump inspired new political party can wipe out the illusion of the Democrat/Republican two-party system; specifically because much of the Trump movement consists of former democrats and brand new voters.


The MAGA coalition is the most diverse, widest and deepest part of the entire American electorate. President Trump’s army consists of every creed, color, race, gender, ethnicity and orientation. It is a truly color-blind coalition of middle America patriots and middle-class voters that cuts through the political special interest groups. Quite simply Trump’s MAGA army is the ultimate political splitter party. No Republican will ever hold office in the next decade without the blessing of President Trump; and there is absolutely no current confidence that President Trump will not lay waste to the system if the GOP acquiesces to the transparent fraud that exists behind the Biden-Harris sham.

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“News channels don’t count a damn thing. They just report numbers shipped out by election offices in various counties across the country, and if CNN or any other news outfit were actually doing their jobs, they would be alert for patterns suggesting fraud in the numbers..”

The Kafka Election: Finding a Way Out of the Maze (Miele)

The 2020 election is a nightmare from which I — along with millions of others — am trying to awake. Like many dark dreams, it is uncertain exactly what is happening. Phantasmic ballots come and go. Seemingly insurmountable Republican victories disappear into the mouth of a vote-munching machine and come out the other side as excremental — oops, I mean incremental — Democratic leads just beyond the reach of a recount. And as in any nightmare worth its salt, just when you think it’s about to end, a new trap door opens and you fall into yet one more level of confusion and chaos in a maze with no exit in sight. But this is America. It’s not supposed to be a Kafka novel.

So how did we get to a place where, days after the election was held, despite many proclamations by news organizations to the contrary, we still don’t know who won, we don’t know who voted, and we don’t know for sure whether the rules were followed in either voting or counting? Various irregularities have been reported in five big cities, all in strategic states, and particularly in Detroit, Mich.; Philadelphia, Pa.; Atlanta, Ga.; Milwaukee, Wis.; and Las Vegas, Nev. The allegations range from mysterious ballot drops that seem to show tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden and zero votes for President Trump, inexplicable record turnouts in late-counting counties (all Democrat-dominated) that far surpass turnouts in counties in other states where the votes were counted on a timely basis; and of course the illegal banning of election observers in those very counties where the most outrageous anomalies are reported.

Democrats tell us that there is nothing to see here, and the compliant media dutifully moves along, unwilling to investigate on its own or even express any concern about potential wrongdoing. Even Fox News has turned into a lapdog for the Democrat Party, calling Arizona for Joe Biden long before anyone could know for sure which way the state would turn. On Thursday night, as Fulton County was just about to swing Georgia into the Biden column, CNN’s John King arrogantly lectured Donald Trump: “Guess what, Mr. President? We’re gonna count the votes, and if they favor you, we’re gonna show that. And if they don’t, we’re gonna show that. That’s how democracy works. We’re just counting the votes.”


Um, no, that’s not the way it works. News channels don’t count a damn thing. They just report numbers shipped out by election offices in various counties across the country, and if CNN or any other news outfit were actually doing their jobs, they would be alert for patterns suggesting fraud in the numbers they report. If “just counting the votes” were all that it took to have a democracy, then Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be a glorious example of democracy, as would the Islamic Republic of Iran.

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We’re 11 months into a pandemic. And still we know so little.

Speedy COVID19 Healers Keep Producing Antibodies After Infection (F.)

New research has identified a group of Covid-19 patients who are capable of speedy recoveries and can produce protective antibodies for months after their initial infection, a finding that runs counter to a lot of recent research showing that antibody levels — and, potentially, immunity — rapidly decline following infection and points to the possibility that some people have immune systems that are better able to fight the virus. Researchers, led by a team at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, found that almost one in five coronavirus patients sustained antibody production for several months after infection, in contrast with other patients who experienced a rapid decline in antibody levels.

These patients also tended to recover faster than other Covid-19 patients, cutting their recovery time by about a third, as well as showing differences in two types of immune cell that play key roles in the immune system, the researchers wrote in Cell, a top scientific journal. It is unclear whether the findings are representative of the population as a whole, and the researchers themselves stressed that future investigations must look beyond the limited demographic they studied, with most volunteers being adult white women with mild Covid-19. Dr. Duane Wesemann, one of the researchers and an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, said the immune response of these quick healers was like an insurance policy — “it’s the immune system’s way of adding a potential layer of protection against future encounters with the virus,” he said.

Wesemann added that it was possible the findings “point to a type of immune response” that is better at dealing with Covid-19, which could be important in the fight to control the virus. Understanding how the immune system responds to Covid-19 over time is a vital component in controlling the pandemic, underpinning public health measures, treatments, and how vaccines are developed and administered. A lot of early attention has focused on antibodies, proteins produced by the immune system that can lock onto the virus, with research generally showing sharp declines following infection. These are relatively easy to study, but do not give a complete picture of the body’s immune system.


There is a lot that remains unknown about how immunity to Covid-19 works and how that changes over time. To date, many studies show sharp declines in antibody levels in the months following infection, though antibodies, or the lack thereof, do not necessarily indicate immunity to infection. Reinfections, though rare, have been reported, with some reports suggesting that the second infection is worse than the first.

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This is good. A bit long and opinionated and all over the place, but a lot of useful information.

The COVID-19 RT-PCR Test (Sacré)

All current propaganda on the COVID-19 pandemic is based on an assumption that is considered obvious, true and no longer questioned: Positive RT-PCR test means being sick with COVID. This assumption is misleading. Very few people, including doctors, understand how a PCR test works. RT-PCR means Real Time-Polymerase Chain Reaction. In French, it means: Réaction de Polymérisation en Chaîne en Temps Réel. In medicine, we use this tool mainly to diagnose a viral infection. Starting from a clinical situation with the presence or absence of particular symptoms in a patient, we consider different diagnoses based on tests.

In the case of certain infections, particularly viral infections, we use the RT-PCR technique to confirm a diagnostic hypothesis suggested by a clinical picture. We do not routinely perform RT-PCR on any patient who is overheated, coughing or has an inflammatory syndrome! It is a laboratory, molecular biology technique of gene amplification because it looks for gene traces (DNA or RNA) by amplifying them. In addition to medicine, other fields of application are genetics, research, industry and forensics. The technique is carried out in a specialized laboratory, it cannot be done in any laboratory, even a hospital. This entails a certain cost, and a delay sometimes of several days between the sample and the result.

Today, since the emergence of the new disease called COVID-19 (COrona VIrus Disease-2019), the RT-PCR diagnostic technique is used to define positive cases, confirmed as SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus responsible for the new acute respiratory distress syndrome called COVID-19). These positive cases are assimilated to COVID-19 cases, some of whom are hospitalized or even admitted to intensive care units. Official postulate of our managers: positive RT-PCR cases = COVID-19 patients. This is the starting postulate, the premise of all official propaganda, which justifies all restrictive government measures: isolation, confinement, quarantine, mandatory masks, color codes by country and travel bans, tracking, social distances in companies, stores and even, even more importantly, in schools.


This misuse of RT-PCR technique is used as a relentless and intentional strategy by some governments, supported by scientific safety councils and by the dominant media, to justify excessive measures such as the violation of a large number of constitutional rights, the destruction of the economy with the bankruptcy of entire active sectors of society, the degradation of living conditions for a large number of ordinary citizens, under the pretext of a pandemic based on a number of positive RT-PCR tests, and not on a real number of patients.

Read more …

A long review of an old topic.

The Narrative Problem After Peak Oil (Watkins)

For most of the last decade, we have been sold a techno-utopian fairy tale about “peak oil demand.” Instead of “running out” of oil, the problem for the oil industry, we were told, was that the switch to “clean energy” and to technologies like electric cars and hydrogen-powered buses meant that demand for oil was declining. Within a decade or so, they claimed, our need for oil would disappear entirely as we ushered in a “fourth industrial revolution” based around digital products and services powered by renewable energy.


As with all narratives, there is just enough truth in this story to give it a veneer of credibility. Per capita demand for oil – and, indeed, for fossil fuels generally – has been declining. So that is you are a middle class metropolitan liberal – the kind of people who edit and write for the establishment media – you look around and notice your friends driving electric cars; you uncritically swallow the press statements of the windfarm owners; and you observe the declining per capita consumption of oil; and you tell yourself that this is peak oil demand in action. The data says something very different:

Despite a Herculean effort to bring non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies online, they still account for less than five percent of global primary energy consumption. Worse still, they have not replaced fossil fuels; they have just been added to the global mix. And while developed states like Germany and the UK have gone a long way toward decarbonising their domestic electricity generation, a large part of their true pollution has been offshored to Asia. Only if they are prepared to forego all of the fossil-fuel powered goods they import can they truly claim to be embarking upon a new industrial revolution. Until then, the “green new deal” is just another name for the same old imperialism that they have always practiced.

Peak oil – including from fracking and tar sands – finally occurred in 2018. Hardly anyone noticed because – as happened in the USA in 1970 – everyone assumed that it would be a temporary blip. Oil extraction in 2019 was not substantially lower than 2018; but there was no month in 2019 when extraction was higher than it had been in November 2018. And, of course, in 2020 the world discovered more urgent issues to worry about. Nevertheless, oil extraction – and oil demand – plummeted as a result of the various state responses to the pandemic. Some wells will be shut permanently as the cost of reopening them is too high. Others will reopen, but only if the price of oil rises considerably. Pipelines and refineries will also have to be repaired. On the demand side, even the most optimistic economists and politicians have ceased talking about “V-shaped recoveries.” With Europe and parts of the USA embarking on pre-Christmas lockdowns, demand across the global economy is expected to be crushed. This spells lower rather than higher oil prices in the next couple of years.


It is in this that we glimpse the part of the peak oil story that was often overlooked by the first peak oilers. The simple assumption that falling oil production would lead to higher oil prices failed to examine the impact of oil prices on the wider economy. Nevertheless, the economy is primarily an energy system upon which the secondary financial economy is merely a claim. Rather than examining the price of oil, we have to understand its energy cost. If we begin with a certain amount of energy, then a fraction must be devoted to securing future energy. Another fraction must be set aside for maintaining the infrastructure required to keep the system running. A third fraction must be set aside to invest in the future energy supply. These, though, will only account for a small part of the energy available to us. The remainder will power the much larger, non-energy economy

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Michelle Malkin

 

 

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Jun 222015
 
 June 22, 2015  Posted by at 10:40 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  2 Responses »


Unknown Dutch Gap, Virginia. Picket station of Colored troops 1864

Five Horsemen Of The Euro’s Future (Politico)
The Three Victories Of The Greek Government (Jacques Sapir)
Greece and Germany Agree the Euro Can’t Work (Crook)
The Euro Was Doomed From The Start (Norman Lamont)
If Greece Defaults, Europe’s Taxpayers Lose (Bloomberg)
Why On Earth Is Greece In The EU? (Angelos)
EU Welcomes 11th-Hour Greek Proposals In ‘Forceps Delivery’ (Reuters)
EU Commission Gives Guarded Welcome To Greek Plan Before Talks Bloomberg)
Greece Creditors Aim To Strike Deal To Include 6-Month Extension (Guardian)
Pro-Greek Demos In Brussels, Amsterdam Before Crunch Summit (AFP)
The Flash-Crash Trader’s Kafkaesque Nightmare (Bloomberg)
China Regulator Official Fired After Husband Suspected of Illegal Trading (WSJ)
Australian Housing Market Facing ‘Bloodbath’ Collapse: Economists (SMH)
Canada’s Giant Pension Funds Are The New Masters Of The Universe (Telegraph)
EU Extends Economic Sanctions Against Russia For 6 Months (RT)
Ayn Rand Killed The American Dream (Mathieu Ricard)
Behind the Scenes With the Pope’s Secret Science Committee (Bloomberg)
UK Scientific Model Flags Risk Of Civilisation’s Collapse By 2040 (Nafeez Ahmed)

What a list of incompetent power hungry doofuses.

Five Horsemen Of The Euro’s Future (Politico)

The threat of an imminent Greek exit from the euro may be the talk of Brussels, but the EU is unveiling bold proposals this week to deepen political and financial integration inside the eurozone. A so-called “five presidents’ report” obtained by POLITICO includes calls for a eurozone finance minister and stricter controls over the budgets of the 19 countries, including Greece, that use the single currency. The glossy 24-page document — entitled “Completing Europe’s Monetary and Economic Union” — will be published on Monday. It’s to be discussed at the EU summit that begins Thursday in Brussels. Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker drafted the report with European Council chief Donald Tusk; Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem; Mario Draghi, president of the ECB; and European Parliament President Martin Schulz.

Coming ahead of an emergency EU summit on Greece Monday night in Brussels, a report on the future of the eurozone may seem ill-timed. But several governments, including Berlin, are more open now than ever to at least discuss steps toward deeper integration proposed by the “five presidents,” seeing it as a signal of reassurance to financial markets that the euro will endure any outcome on Greece. The proposals mostly echo calls by Germany and other rich northern eurozone countries to enforce spending rules across the eurozone. It won’t go down well in Greece or the poorer southern rim states, which want more “solidarity” within the eurozone — in other words, financial support in times of trouble.

The report doesn’t foresee common lending (“euro bonds”) and only alludes to a “euro area-wide fiscal stabilisation function” in case national budgets are “overwhelmed.” The “five presidents” call their proposal for future eurozone governance a “roadmap that is ambitious yet pragmatic,” sketching out several stages to deepen the union. In a first “deepening by doing” stage, the EU would “build on existing instruments and make the best possible use of the existing Treaties” to enforce the eurozone’s fiscal rules. The second stage, which potentially could mean changes to the EU treaties that would cause difficult discussions about transferring more powers to the EU, is not supposed to start until 2017, the report says. A “genuine Fiscal Union” requires more joint decision-making on fiscal policy, the report says.

While not every aspect of each country’s spending and tax policies will be overseen by Brussels, “some decisions will increasingly need to be made collectively while ensuring democratic accountability and legitimacy,” report says. It calls for a “future euro area treasury“ that “could be the place for such collective decision-making.”

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“..the EU’s political and economic apparatus has openly demonstrated its harmfulness, incompetence and rapacity.”

The Three Victories Of The Greek Government (Jacques Sapir)

Whatever the outcome of the Eurogroup to be held on June 22, it is now clear that the Greek government – improperly called “government of the radical left” or “government of SYRIZA,” but in reality a government union (and the fact that this union was made with the sovereigntist party ANEL is significant) – has won spectacular successes. These successes show that Greece, where the people have regained their dignity, is the one European country where the example set by its government is now showing the way forward. But, and this is most important, this government – in the fight it has led against what is euphemistically called the “institutions”, ie mainly the political-economic apparatus of the EU, the Eurogroup, the ECB – has shown that the “Emperor has no cIothes.” 

The entire structure, complex and lacking in transparency of this politico-economic apparatus was challenged to respond to a political demand, and it has been unable to do so. The image of the EU has been fundamentally altered. Whatever kind of meeting next Monday, if it results in a failure or a surrender of Germany and “austéritaire” or even, which we can not exclude, in the defeat of the Greek government, the EU’s political and economic apparatus has openly demonstrated its harmfulness, incompetence and rapacity. The peoples of the European countries now know who is their worst enemy. The Greek government, in the course of the negotiations which started at the end of January, was faced with the inflexible position of these “institutions”.  But this inflexibility has reflected more a tragic lack of strategy, and the pursuit of conflicting objectives, than real will. 

Indeed, it was well understood that these “institutions” had no intention of yielding on the principle of Euro-austerity, an austerity policy at European level set up under the pretext of “saving the euro”. Therefore, they have refused the pIea of the Greek government whose proposals were reasonable, as many economists have stressed. The proposals made by these “institutions” have been described as the economic equivalent of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by a columnist who is not listed on the left of the political spectrum. We must understand this as a terrible admission of failure. A position was publicly defended by the representatives of the EU which was in no way based in reality, with the soIe defense for this being a narrow ideology. These representatives were incapable of evoIving their positions and trapped themselves in false arguments, in the same way that the US government chained itself to the issue of weapons of mass destruction attributed to Saddam Hussein.

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The one thing they can agree on, but also the one thing neither acts on. Curious.

Greece and Germany Agree the Euro Can’t Work (Crook)

Ahead of Monday’s European Union summit, the only thing you can rule out is a happy ending. Whatever happens at the leaders’ meeting – even if a deal of some sort emerges – the EU has suffered lasting and perhaps irreparable damage. The available choices run from bad to terrible. The costs to Greece and to the EU of a default followed by Greece’s ejection from the euro system could be huge. But even if the worst doesn’t happen, Europe has suffered a total breakdown of trust and goodwill. That can’t easily be undone – and it’s a dagger pointed at the heart of the entire project. Two things, I believe, will strike historians as they look back on this collapse of European solidarity. The first is that the principals were able to draw such a poisonous dispute out of such an easily solvable problem.

The second helps to explain why that was possible: Greece and its partners fell out thanks to a delusion they have in common — the idea that sharing a currency can leave fiscal sovereignty intact. On the eve of the summit, the economic distance between Greece and its creditors is small. Differences over fiscal targets have narrowed down to timing — what happens next year rather than the year after — and fractions of a%age point of gross domestic product. There’s even tacit agreement that further debt relief will be needed as part of a successor bailout program, though the creditors won’t discuss the details until the current program is completed. That’s a procedural rather than substantive issue, and it simply shouldn’t matter.

The problem is that the creditors don’t trust Alexis Tsipras and his Syriza ministers to hit the targets they might sign up to. The creditors don’t even trust them to try. They want firm commitments to specific policy changes – tax increases and new retirement rules to cut pension spending – that Tsipras has promised not to accept. Again, the revenue these policies would generate is small in relation to the fiscal adjustment Greece has already achieved and to the forecasting errors involved in all such calculations. It isn’t the numbers that separate the two sides. Greece and the creditors are standing on principle, and oddly enough it’s essentially the same principle — that of sovereignty.

Greece has had enough of being dictated to by the rest of the EU. Of course, its government wants debt relief and a milder profile of fiscal adjustment – and that’s justified, because without them the Greek economy will recover too slowly, if at all. But more than debt relief and softer fiscal targets, Greece wants to be back in charge of its own policy. Its years under the creditors’ supervision have been terrible. Being force-fed any more of their medicine is what the country rejected when it voted for Syriza.

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Lamont was instrumental in keeping Britain out of the eurozone.

The Euro Was Doomed From The Start (Norman Lamont)

Next week will be a momentous one for Europe, with a string of crucial meetings including the summit at which the PM will table his renegotiation demands. We may be focused on our renegotiation but it is Greece which will dominate. For some time it has looked as though the Greek drama must reach its final denouement. But the Greeks have become highly skilled at managing to push back deadlines ever further into the future. Whether Greece leaves the euro or stays in, a decision surely cannot be delayed much longer. So what will this mean for the EU? I had the privilege of negotiating Britain’s opt-out from the then new European single currency in 1991. My abiding memory is how clear it was that the euro had nothing to do with economics and was a political project with a dubious rationale.

Some representatives of other countries were openly sceptical, but their political masters were firmly in control. The creation of the euro has been an error of historic dimensions and done great harm to the EU, which in its first 40 years had brought economic prosperity to the citizens of the Continent. Then the less well-off countries benefited from the lowering of tariffs and the increase in internal trade. After the creation of the euro, however, economic growth slowed markedly. Poorer countries fared worse than the more prosperous countries, like Germany, which benefited from the new, weaker currency. The Greek crisis epitomises the complete mess that Europe has made of the single currency.

Greece should never have been admitted in the first place, though it was not the only country – Belgium and Italy were two others – that didn’t meet the strict criteria for membership. From the beginning, the rules put in place for the euro, relating to bail-outs, monetary financing and deficit levels, have been ignored. Europe claims to be a rule-based organisation. But however else the eurozone is run, it is not run strictly according to its own rules.

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Nice graphs! Let’s hope author Whitehouse understands this was not a mistake, but a plan. If Greece had restructured in 2010, the banks would have been on the hook. By waiting 2 years, most could be transferred to taxpayers.

If Greece Defaults, Europe’s Taxpayers Lose (Bloomberg)

The European creditors embroiled in a last-ditch effort to come to terms with Greece face a dilemma: If they can’t prevent a default, their taxpayers stand to lose a lot of money. Ever since the region’s sovereign-debt crisis first flared in 2010, European nations have been stepping in for Greece’s private creditors – largely German and French banks – by lending the country the money to pay them off. Thanks to this bailout, banks and investors have much less at stake than before. Here, for example, are the exposures of countries’ banks to Greece’s government, companies and financial institutions at the end of 2014, compared to the end of 2009:

On the flip side, European governments – and Germany in particular – have become the largest holders of Greece’s €313 billion in sovereign debt, through an alphabet soup of entities that are ultimately backed by taxpayers. Beyond that, as of April, the European Central Bank had lent the Bank of Greece about €115 billion to replace money being pulled out of the country – credit that can turn into losses for the ECB’s remaining shareholders if Greece leaves the euro. Here’s a breakdown of those exposures by country:

The lesson is that in a sovereign debt crisis, dithering can be costly. If European countries had pushed Greece to restructure its private debts back in 2010 (instead of waiting until 2012) and recapitalized banks that were in too deep, the whole region probably could have come out of the crisis much more quickly. As it stands, five years later, Greece and its creditors are back at the negotiating table, with more than 300 billion euros in taxpayer money hanging in the balance.

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Lofty ideals.

Why On Earth Is Greece In The EU? (Angelos)

Europe is a Greek word. After Greece applied to join the European Community in 1975, Konstantinos Karamanlis, the country’s prime minister, often emphasized this point to his European counterparts. The implication was clear: Greece, the font of Europe’s civilization, naturally belonged in the European club. As Karamanlis later put it, “the Greek spirit contributed the idea of Freedom, Truth and Beauty” to European culture. Some had their doubts about whether Greece belonged in the European club, however. The European Commission, in issuing its opinion on Greece’s membership bid, warned that the Greek economy had a weak industrial base, which would limit its capacity to “combine homogeneously” with other member states. German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt worried about Greece’s problematic public administration, and its inability to collect taxes from its wealthiest citizens.

European leaders ultimately found Karamanlis’ argument about Greece’s cultural import persuasive, and it was one reason they set aside their concerns and admitted Greece in 1981. As former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing later put it in his memoir, Greece is the “mother of all democracies,” and therefore could not be excluded. Two decades later, when Greece joined the euro, further cementing its place in the European project, it seemed only appropriate that the Greek two-euro coin would depict Europa, the beautiful maiden of Greek mythology who shares the continent’s name. Today, Europa’s place on the coin is in peril as Greece remains dangerously close to a default that could lead to a euro exit. Those considerable problems Europe once overlooked seem to have come back to haunt it.

Even Giscard seems to have had a change of heart. “Greece is basically an Oriental country,” he told the German magazine Der Spiegel in 2012. He was interviewed alongside Schmidt, his old counterpart, who had been more skeptical of Greece’s bid. “You were wiser than me,” Giscard told Schmidt. Europeans’ bipolar view of Greece — that it is both intrinsic to Europe and yet does not belong — has been evident since the nation’s modern founding. When the Greeks revolted against the centuries-long rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1821, European admirers of Ancient Greece rejoiced over the possibility of a resurrected Athens that might once again bestow upon Europe the glories of its classical heyday.

“We are all Greeks,” Shelley wrote, the year the Greek revolution broke out. Europe owed to Greece its civilization, he meant, and was therefore obliged to back the Greek cause. Philhellenic societies across Europe raised money for Greece, and European volunteers traveled there to join the fight.

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“In German: ‘eine Zangengeburt. (A birth that requires a pair of pliers).” The German language is full of very descriptive terms.

EU Welcomes 11th-Hour Greek Proposals In ‘Forceps Delivery’ (Reuters)

The European Union welcomed new proposals from Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as a “good basis for progress” at talks on Monday where creditors want 11th-hour concessions to haul Athens back from the brink of bankruptcy. EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker’s chief-of-staff spoke of a “forceps delivery” as officials worked late into the night to produce a deal ahead of a summit of euro zone leaders in Brussels that they hope can keep Greece in the currency bloc. Giving no detail of a proposal he said was also received by the ECB and IMF, German EU official Martin Selmayr tweeted: “Good basis for progress at … Euro Summit. In German: ‘eine Zangengeburt’.”

After four months of wrangling and with anxious depositors pulling billions of euros out of Greek banks, Tsipras’s leftist government showed a new willingness at the weekend to make concessions that would unlock frozen aid to avert default. It was not immediately clear how far the new proposal yielded to creditors’ demands for additional spending cuts and tax hikes, but the offer was a ray of hope that a last-minute deal may yet be wrangled before Athens runs out of cash. Tsipras spent much of Sunday holed up in a marathon cabinet meeting and discussed the new offer with the leaders of Germany, France and the European Commission by phone. “The prime minister presented the three leaders Greece’s proposal for a mutually beneficial agreement that will give a definitive solution and not a postponement of addressing the problem,” a statement from Tsipras’s office said.

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That’s a first.

EU Commission Gives Guarded Welcome To Greek Plan Before Talks Bloomberg)

A new proposal by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras drew a rare positive nod from European officials who indicated it could help break a months-long impasse during marathon talks on Monday. The new offer “was a good basis for progress” ahead of Monday’s emergency summit, European Commission spokesman Martin Selmayr, said in a Twitter posting. He also referred in German to the inception of the plan as “birth by forceps.” “These proposals go in the right direction,” European Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said on Europe 1 radio. Reaching an accord is “very important for Greece, for the Greeks, important for the euro and for Europe. And this time around it’s decisive because we must be aware that the markets are watching.”

The euro gained as much as 0.5% against the dollar in Asian trading and was still trading higher in the early European session. Greek bonds inched higher in early trading Monday, with the yield on notes maturing in 2017 falling 38 basis points to 28.49% at 9:41 a.m. local time. Spanish and Italian government bonds were also trading higher. Before the start of the summit in Brussels, Tsipras will meet with representatives of the countries’ main creditors. He’ll sit down with European Council head Donald Tusk before they’re joined by ECB President Mario Draghi, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem, an e-mailed statement from the Greek prime minister’s office said.

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“Democracy cannot be blackmailed, dignity cannot be bargained..”

Greece Creditors Aim To Strike Deal To Include 6-Month Extension (Guardian)

Greece’s creditors are aiming to strike a deal on Monday to stop Athens defaulting on its debt and possibly tumbling out of the euro, by extending its bailout by six months, supplying up to €18bn in rescue funds, and pledging later debt relief for the austerity-battered country. But EU officials, privately disclosing details of the proposed deal, stressed that a breakthrough hinged on the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, making concessions on fiscal targets, pensions cuts and tax increases that he has resisted since he came to power five months ago. Following a cabinet meeting in Athens, Tsipras is believed to have offered Greece’s creditors concessions on tax and pensions reform. But it was not clear whether the offer went far enough to make a final agreement possible on Monday.

Time is also running out for the Greek banking system, with Reuters reporting on Sunday that €1bn worth of withdrawal orders had been lodged with Greek banks over the weekend – on top of the €4bn that left the Greek banking system last week – and that the ECB is set to discuss extending financial help to those institutions on Monday morning, amid fears that Greek banks will be unable to open on Tuesday. A hectic round of telephone diplomacy took place on Saturday and Sunday between leaders in Athens, Berlin, Paris, and Brussels while technocrats on both sides sought to hammer out the small print of the fiscal arithmetic forming the basis for a last-minute agreement days before Greece’s bailout expires. Greece must pay €1.6bn owed to the International Monetary Fund by Tuesday 30 June.

With time running out, the only way an IMF default could now be avoided was for the ECB to raise the ceiling on the short-term debt or T-bills Athens is allowed to sell, the officials said. This would need to happen by Monday next week. The sources also signalled moves to assuage Tsipras’s key demand – that the creditors need to offer debt relief to Greece. Some form of debt restructuring would be promised to Athens, but it would come with strings attached and not as part of the current bailout package, they said. Yanis Varoufakis, the outspoken Greek finance minister, said Greece’s fate hinged on the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and told her she faced a stark decision. He added that there would be no agreement that did not include the prospect of debt relief for Greece.

Varoufakis’s spokesman reacted sceptically to suggestions of creditor promises on eventual debt relief, describing the eurozone as “pathological liars”. [..] “Democracy cannot be blackmailed, dignity cannot be bargained,” the party said in a statement on Sunday. “Workers, the unemployed, young people, the Greek people and the rest of the peoples of Europe will send a loud message of resistance to the alleged one-way path of austerity, resistance to the blackmail and scaremongering.”

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Too late and especially too little.

Pro-Greek Demos In Brussels, Amsterdam Before Crunch Summit (AFP)

Several thousand demonstrators gathered in Brussels on Sunday and several hundred in Amsterdam to plead for solidarity with cash-strapped Greece on the eve of a make-or-break summit with European leaders. Addressing the crowd in Amsterdam, veteran Greek MEP Manolis Glezos urged Athens’ creditors to give the country «one more year» to resolve its debt crisis. “This crisis was caused by the financial sector, not by the Greek people,» said Glezos, a Greek resistance hero against Nazi occupation in World War II, who at 92 years old remains a firebrand politician. “It’s the financial sector that has to pay, not the Greek people,» Glezos said to the loud applause of around 350 demonstrators at Amsterdam’s historic Dam Square. Some of the protesters waved Greek flags while others carried placards saying: «No more EU austerity» and «Stop EU blackmail.”

Demonstrator Sotiris Dialas, 32, told AFP he was «worried about tomorrow» when EU leaders will attend an emergency summit aimed at staving off a Greek default. “I have many friends in Greece and nobody knows what’s going to happen,» he said, draped in a Greek flag. In Brussels, demo organiser Sebastien Franco told Belgian national television channel La Une that austerity was not the answer to Greeces problems. “Austerity is not working, it reduces the income of poor people in the name of reimbursement to creditors… who continue to enrich themselves,» he said. Some 3,500 people turned out for the demo in the Belgian capital, according to Belga news agency, citing police figures. Sunday’s rallies came a day after thousands of people demonstrated in France, Germany and Italy to express solidarity with migrants in Europe and austerity-hit Greece.

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“A U.K. judge has declared the 36-year-old a flight risk and set his bail at $5 million, which is roughly what Sarao says his net worth is. The problem is that his assets are frozen and the judge refuses to accept his family home as surety..”

The Flash-Crash Trader’s Kafkaesque Nightmare (Bloomberg)

How do you prove you don’t have $35 million of ill-gotten gains parked in an offshore account? That’s the dilemma facing Navinder Singh Sarao, known variously as the “Flash-Crash Trader” and the “Hound of Hounslow” and currently residing at Her Majesty’s pleasure in London’s Wandsworth prison. Sarao is accused of contributing to -but not causing, mind you; the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is adamant about that- the so-called “flash crash” that briefly wiped $1 trillion off the value of U.S. stocks on May 6, 2010. You can read the U.S. Justice Department’s case here. He faces a maximum prison term of 20 years for wire fraud, 25 years for commodities fraud, and 10 years for market manipulation and spoofing. The case against Sarao smells strongly of scapegoating.

First, there’s the issue of whether the misdeed he is accused of -“spoofing” the market- is a crime at all, as my colleague Matt Levine has explained at length, including here and here. (Importantly, if a London judge decides it’s not a crime in the U.K. to rapidly trade and cancel $3.5 billion worth of futures contracts in the space of two hours, then Sarao can’t be extradited.) Second, there are the financial machinations that are keeping Sarao in a prison cell, bringing to mind Franz Kafka’s novel, “The Trial.” A U.K. judge has declared the 36-year-old a flight risk and set his bail at $5 million, which is roughly what Sarao says his net worth is. The problem is that his assets are frozen and the judge refuses to accept his family home as surety, meaning Sarao may end up languishing in prison until he is extradited to the U.S. to face his accusers, which could take years.

What’s more, the CFTC is convinced he’s got money hidden away that he hasn’t declared. The regulator says Sarao made more than $40 million of profit, which is “stashed in a variety of offshore accounts and vehicles, as well as other apparently speculative foreign business ventures and are in danger of being concealed and/or dissipated.” That sounds pretty damning – until you get to the financial evidence presented in the U.S. complaint. A change in U.K. tax law created a heavy tax liability under his existing offshore accounts. To mitigate that, he created something called International Guarantee Corporation in 2012 in Anguilla in the British West Indies. (He also had a company, Nav Sarao Milking Markets, which he had set up two years earlier in Nevis.) Sarao seems to have been borrowing money from his company to fund his trading and reinvesting the profits in the company -a perfectly legal structure some of my wealthy friends have used in the past.

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A country corrupted from head to toe.

China Regulator Official Fired After Husband Suspected of Illegal Trading (WSJ)

China’s stock-market regulator said Saturday it had dismissed the head of the bureau that monitors share issuance after her husband was suspected of illegal stock trading. The China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a statement on its official Weibo microblog account that the official, Li Zhiling, was suspected of breaking the law and had been turned over to police. Her husband’s name wasn’t given. In the statement, the oversight body vowed to “investigate and deal severely with” any irregularities or legal violations without providing further detail. Calls to the regulatory commission went unanswered. The Wall Street Journal has been unable to contact Ms. Li or her husband. According to the website of the business magazine Caixin, Ms. Li was named to her post in 2012 and remained in charge after a reorganization in April 2014 that saw several departments combined.

The oversight agency said Saturday in its Weibo statement that it would redouble efforts to enhance control. “She’s suspected of breaking the law by taking advantage of her position,” it said. “Once we discover such violations, we will immediately take action to punish them. We do not take this lightly.” The commission’s pledge to root out malfeasance came as China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index suffered its worst weekly decline in years, with China’s largest market falling 13% over the past five trading sessions, including more than 6% on Friday. This follows a more than doubling of the market over the past year, fueled in part by a sharp increase in margin trading.

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Better wake up. Sell!

Australian Housing Market Facing ‘Bloodbath’ Collapse: Economists (SMH)

The Australian real estate market is in the grip of the biggest housing bubble in the nation’s history and Melbourne will be at the epicentre of an historic “bloodbath” when it bursts, according to two housing economists. Lindsay David and Philip Soos, who have authored books on the overheated housing market, have berated the housing industry and politicians who refuse to acknowledge the existence of a bubble due to a perceived shortage of housing in the major capitals. In a blunt submission to the upcoming parliamentary inquiry into home ownership, the pair claim there is actually an oversupply of housing, just as there was in the United States just before the market collapse that precipitated the global financial crisis.

And the largest oversupply is in Melbourne, where they forecast available homes outstrip demand by 123,000. “Contrary to the analyses of the vested interests, the data clearly establishes Australia is in the midst of the largest housing bubble on record. Policymakers are caught between a rock and a hard place, as implementing needed reforms will likely burst the bubble,” Mr David and Mr Soos state in a submission on behalf of real estate and financial services research house, LF Economics. They believe the current bubble is worse than those in the 1880s, 1920s, mid-1970s and late 1980s. “Australian economic history and recent international events illustrate collapsing housing bubbles can quickly increase the number of unsold properties (stale stock), shattering the pervasive myth of a deleterious dwelling shortage,” they wrote.

“Should this occur alongside rising unemployment and underemployment, reduced aggregate demand and falling net overseas migration, the combination of declining population growth and an oversupply of investment properties would place further downwards pressure on rental prices. Falling housing and rental prices, including sales, would be a doomsday trifecta for investors as they suffer losses in both capital prices and net rental incomes. “This calamitous outcome is especially likely in Melbourne where rents have not increased in real terms since 2010. Melbourne is primed to become the epicentre of a legendary housing market crash due to the combination of a staggering boom in real housing prices (178%). Perth is also in a serious predicament.”

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No more safe investments.

Canada’s Giant Pension Funds Are The New Masters Of The Universe (Telegraph)

Since 1790, the United States has suffered 16 banking crises, while Canada, a country that counts the US as its largest trading partner, has experienced none — not even during the Great Depression. How has Canada achieved such an extraordinary feat? Two reasons, according to the IMF: limited exposure to international banking operations, which meant far fewer foreign liabilities than many of their overseas peers and less globally integrated banking systems; and, Canada’s restrictions on mergers of major domestic banks, where rules prohibit a single shareholder – domestic or foreign – from owning more than 20pc of voting rights in a major bank. The World Economic Forum described Canada’s banking system as the most sound in the world, and Mark Carney was appointed Bank of England Governor largely on the basis of his impressive work at the Bank of Canada.

As one Canadian banker once put it, the country’s financial system, unlike those of many other countries, has always been well-capitalised, well-managed, well-diversified and well-regulated. By avoiding the financial crisis, Canada’s experience of recession in the years that followed 2008 was much more forgiving than the rest of the industrialised world, and it led the G-7 pack in terms of growth. As a result, Canada found the confidence to flex its muscles globally. Leading the charge overseas has been a pack of colossal public pension funds taking part in a remarkable spending spree, snapping up prime assets all over the world. According to reports, one of its largest, Borealis Infrastructure, is planning another big swoop.

The infrastructure arm of the $57bn Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System is eyeing a second bid for Severn Trent, the UK FTSE 100 water company. Borealis made a move for Severn Trent two years ago, but as part of a consortium involving investors from the US and Kuwait. This time it isn’t clear whether the Canadians still have partners or are operating alone – the reports are unconfirmed but a solo bid for a company of Severn Trent’s size would be hugely ambitious – the last time a FTSE 100 constituent was taken private was when KKR swooped on Alliance Boots in 2007 – the largest European buyout so far. Still, if anyone could pull off such a deal, it is probably one of the Canadian pension fund beasts. The country’s four largest funds manage more than $600bn between them and rank among the 40 largest in the world. Only the US can make similar claims.

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How the EU will split.

EU Extends Economic Sanctions Against Russia For 6 Months (RT)

The European Union has extended economic sanctions against Russian for a further six months, an EU official said. This follows the EU’s decision Friday to extend sanctions against Crimea for another year. The decision to extend the sanctions against Russia was announced by the EU Council’s press officer for foreign affairs, Susanne Kiefer. The sanctions are being maintained until January 31, 2016 to ensure the Minsk agreement is implemented, she wrote in her Twitter account. The European Union will review the sanctions regime against Russia in six or seven months, Italian Foreign Minister Paolo Gentiloni told reporters in Luxembourg. Dialogue with Russia, especially on Libya and Syria, is “crucially important” for the EU, Gentiloni added.

Agreement on the extension of sanctions was reached at a meeting of the EU Permanent Representatives Committee on June 17. In March, the EU Summit adopted a political declaration of intent to extend economic sanctions against Russia for another six months. In the document, the lifting of sanctions was linked to the full implementation of the conditions of the Minsk agreement, for the period up until the end of the year. EU sanctions against Russia include restrictions on lending to major Russian state-owned banks, as well as defense and oil companies. In addition, Brussels imposed restrictions on the supply of weapons and military equipment to Russia as well as military technology, dual-use technologies, high-tech equipment and technologies for oil production. No sanctions were imposed against Russia’s gas industry.

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Nice exposé.

Ayn Rand Killed The American Dream (Mathieu Ricard)

The billionaire investor and philanthropist George Soros uses the term “free market fundamentalism” to describe the belief that the free market is not only the best but the only way of managing an economic system and preserving civil liberties. “The doctrine of laissez-Faire capitalism holds that the common good is best served by the uninhibited pursuit of self-interest,” he writes. If the laissez-faire attitude of an entirely deregulated free market were based on the laws of nature and had some scientific value, if it were anything other than an act of faith pronounced by the champions of ultraliberalism, it would have stood the test of time. But it hasn’t, since its unpredictability and the abuses it has permitted have led to the financial crises with which we are only too familiar.

For Soros, if the doctrine of economic laissez- faire — a term dear to philosopher Ayn Rand — had been submitted to the rigors of scientific and empirical research, it would have been rejected a long time ago. The free market facilitates the creation of businesses; innovation across many fields, for example in new technology, health, the Internet, and renewable energy; and affords undeniable opportunities to young entrepreneurs wishing to start up business activities that will further society. We have also seen that commercial exchange between democratic nations considerably reduces the risk of armed conflict between them. Yet, in the absence of any safeguard, the free market permits a predatory use of financial systems, giving rise to an increase in oligarchies, inequality, exploitation of the poorest producers, and the monetization of several aspects of human life whose value derives from anything other than money.

In his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel, one of the United States’ most high-profile philosophers and an adviser to President Obama, says that neo-liberal economists understand the price of everything and the value of nothing. In 1997, he ruffled a lot of feathers when he questioned the morality of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the agreement that removed the moral stigma attached to environmentally harmful activities by simply introducing the concept of buying the “right to pollute.” In his view, China and the United States are the least receptive countries to his outspoken objections to free market fundamentalism: “In other parts of east Asia, Europe and the UK, and India and Brazil, it goes without arguing that there are moral limits to markets, and the question is where to locate them.”

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They’re not that secret…

Behind the Scenes With the Pope’s Secret Science Committee (Bloomberg)

Several dozen of the world’s most prominent scientists sprang from their seats and left the Vatican hall where they were holding a conference on the environment in May 2014. They were bound for a meet-and-greet with Pope Francis at the modest Vatican hotel where he lives, the Domus Sanctae Marthae. Among the horde was Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Since 2004, he has also been a member of a 400-year-old collective, one that operates as the pope’s eyes and ears on the natural world: the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He had a message for Pope Francis. Only it was too long The academy’s chancellor, Archbishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, suggested to Ramanathan that he condense his thoughts to just two sentences — and deliver them to Francis in Spanish.

Ramanathan, who speaks no Spanish, spent the balance of the eight-minute jaunt committing the words to memory. He got it down with moments to spare. The phrases vanished as soon as he caught a glimpse of Pope Francis himself. The pope has that effect on people. Ramanathan, who is Hindu, reassembled his message in time, and in English. No pressure. All he had to do was sum up more than a century of thought and research that in the past two decades has been validated repeatedly by climate scientists globally. “We are concerned about climate change,” he told Francis. “The poorest 3 billion people are going to suffer the worst consequences. Ramanathan is one of many scientists and other advisers who have, over the last several decades, conveyed the urgency of climate change to the Vatican.

Now, Francis is responding. On Thursday the Vatican will release an encyclical letter, essentially a teaching document for bishops, on climate change and poverty. It draws on and elevates the utterances and writings of previous popes, particularly John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Yesterday, the Italian magazine L’Espresso published an unauthorized draft of the letter, called “Laudato Sii” or “Praised Be.” “Worth noting is the weakness of the international political response” to environmental decay, Francis writes, according to a Bloomberg translation of the draft. Political leaders bow too readily to technology and finance, he writes, and the results are apparent in their failure to protect natural systems: “There are too many special interests, and economic interest very easily comes to prevail over the common good and to manipulate information so that its plans are not hurt.”

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“The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior..” How useful is it then?

UK Scientific Model Flags Risk Of Civilisation’s Collapse By 2040 (Nafeez Ahmed)

New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability. Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies. But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.

The new models are being developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO). The GRO is chiefly funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, but its partners include the British government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO); British bank, Lloyds of London; the Aldersgate Group, the environment coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Africa Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the University of Wisconsin. This week, Lloyds released a report for the insurance industry assessing the risk of a near-term “acute disruption to the global food supply.” Research for the project was led by Anglia Ruskin University’s GSI, and based on its GRO modelling initiative.

The report explores the scenario of a near-term global food supply disruption, considered plausible on the basis of past events, especially in relation to future climate trends. The global food system, the authors find, is “under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.” Lloyd’s scenario analysis shows that food production across the planet could be significantly undermined due to a combination of just three catastrophic weather events, leading to shortfalls in the production of staple crops, and ensuing price spikes. In the scenario, which is “set in the near future,” wheat, maize and soybean prices “increase to quadruple the levels seen around 2000,” while rice prices increase by 500%.

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