Jan 162023
 


James Proudfoot Sun on a House, Dieppe 1937

 

We’re One Tragedy Away From Pitchforks And Torches (Jeftovic)
Temporary Morgues are Being Built Across UK Due to Excess Deaths (GP)
European Parliament Poised To Ban Pfizer Representatives (De Lauzun)
Impeach ‘War Criminal’ Biden Over Ukraine – US Democrat (RT)
The Importance of Being Biden (Turley)
McCarthy Leaves Reporters Silent With Bombshell About Eric Swalwell (TPN)
Destroying American Democracy – An Inside Job (Hoekstra)
Glug Glug, Gurgle Gurgle (Kunstler)
EU Needs ‘War Economy’ – Veteran German Diplomat (RT)
London Rejects Ukraine Helicopters Claim (RT)
NATO Promises More Heavy Weapons For Ukraine (RT)
Zelensky Aide Flip-flops On Apartment Block Blast (RT)
Zelensky Rolls Out New Anti-Russian Sanctions (RT)
Ukrainian Blogger Calls For Genocide Of All Russians (RT)

 

 

 

 

Fasting + ivermectin
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614714917554163713

 

 

 

 

RFKjr – regulators income

 

 

RFK
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614373897067012098

 

 

 

 

Eugenics
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614689938595024896

 

 

 

 

 

 

“It’s going to take a long time to rebuild public trust and probably not while any incumbents are still in office.”

We’re One Tragedy Away From Pitchforks And Torches (Jeftovic)

We know now via the various Twitter Files dumps that Big Tech has been taking their orders from the government, intelligence agencies and Big Pharma (a.k.a The Pharmatrocracy) all along. Should we just assume the corporate press has been as well? This would explain why instead of undertaking Watergate level investigative reporting into legions of children, athletes and young adults suddenly dropping dead or having heart attacks, strokes and other medical emergencies, live on the air; we’re getting gaslighted about childhood asthma from natural gas stoves. I have been wondering if it is possible that the perceived increase in these reports of sudden deaths is the result of a self-perpetuating loop of increased focus on these events.

A kind of hysteria of its own. This is why since the onset of COVID, I’ve always tried to find numbers and data – then I follow that data where it leads me. Often times it’s not the same place as what I’m seeing on the television screen. Anybody can look at a graph, and provided that the data is kosher, see when something is out of whack. This one is out of Dowd’s book and sourced with CDC data is the aggregate excess mortality rate for millennials since before the pandemic. We know that the survival rate from COVID goes up dramatically as age comes down. The vast majority of COVID fatalities were in our elderly (many of whom were forced into localized outbreaks where they died locked down and alone). Two things stand out: #1) The excess death rates spike higher as the vaccines deploy, reaching their highest when mandates kick in. #2) The trend line is going the wrong direction.


[..] The disconnect between what the average person on the street is seeing happen right before their eyes and what they’re being told is happening (or not happening) by paternalistic fact-checking media propagandists will soon come to a breaking point. The only thing that can stop it is for some policymakers and pundits to start throwing the engine brake and try to get out in front of what will be an inevitable public backlash. My fear is this won’t happen. There is too much invested: the entire regime of Digital IDs and health passports was to be built atop the COVID vaccine deployment. Vaxports were supposed to be the official lubricant of The Great Reset. If it turns out that these things are not only ineffective but harmful, it will set The Fourth Industrial Revolution back decades. It’s going to take a long time to rebuild public trust and probably not while any incumbents are still in office.

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If this is true, it should be happening all over.

Temporary Morgues are Being Built Across UK Due to Excess Deaths (GP)

Now, temporary morgues are being used as overflow space by hospitals in the UK with full morgues. This news broke just days after a nationwide alert about “mortuary capacity issues” was issued by the Human Tissue Authority, the agency in charge of regulating the storage of human remains. These temporary morgues, which consist of large shipping containers, are being set up in public places like office parks, the Mirror reported. According to The Sun, vehicles from hospitals such as Salisbury District Hospital in Wiltshire and Royal Liverpool Hospital delivered bodies to the council gritting yard, which has a refrigeration unit guarded 24/7. Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust said, “We can confirm that we have opened additional mortuary capacity to accommodate an increase in need across the local community.”

“Our mortuary service operates to the national standards treating the deceased and loved ones with dignity and respect at all times regardless of location. All our additional capacity provides privacy and has 24/7 security,” it continued. Meanwhile, two additional units have been set up at Royal Liverpool University Hospital. The Liverpool University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which operates the Royal Liverpool Hospital, has stated, “It is common practice for mortuaries to have purpose-built temporary systems available. “This ensures that patients continue to be treated with dignity and respect, in facilities which are equivalent to a permanent mortuary, during periods of increased demand. Two of these systems, which meet standards set out by the Human Tissue Authority, have been deployed at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital,” it continued.

It is not just UK. Funeral homes in Norway sound the alarm as they struggle to store all the dead people as a result of Norway’s skyrocketing excess mortality rate. The number of people needing funeral services in Trondheim City, Central Norway, has risen dramatically, according to the local newspaper Dagbladet Trondheim. Lars Svanholm, the fourth-generation general manager of Trondheim’s largest funeral home, Svanholm & Vigdal Gravferd, has said that the funeral home’s century-long history has never seen anything like the current number of deaths. “It is a marked increase, and we have not experienced anything like it in four generations,” Lars Svanholm told Dagbladet. “We have not had such an increase since the company started in 1922,” said Svanholm to local tv.

Sky Excess

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The only thing they can do is fire Ursula. But can they?

European Parliament Poised To Ban Pfizer Representatives (De Lauzun)

The scandal surrounding Pfizer’s contracts with the European Union over COVID vaccines has taken a new turn. The European Parliament’s COVID committee (COVI) approved on Wednesday, January 11th a proposal to ban Pfizer representatives from Parliament because of the company’s repeated lack of transparency. All political groups approved the proposal, with the exception of the EPP and Renew Europe, but their opposition was not enough to prevent the vote. The procedure has a precedent: in 2017, the agrochemical company Monsanto was also denied access to the European Parliament by the Environment Committee (ENVI) because it had refused to comply with the rule of public hearings.

For several months, many MEPs have been trying to obtain clarification on the conditions under which the European Union concluded contracts for the purchase of COVID vaccines in vain. At issue is the lack of transparency regarding the exact content of the contracts and the repeated exchanges of text messages between Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Albert Bourla systematically refused to attend COVI committee meetings in October 2022 and December 2022, triggering protests from committee members. “The EP has a right to full transparency on the details of this spending and the preliminary negotiations that led to it,” tweeted Kathleen Van Brempt, chair of the COVI committee in December.

It was international markets chair Janine Small who finally confronted the parliamentarians of the COVI committee. She assured the MEPs that the contracts were freely available to them—failing to point out that many passages had been deliberately redacted and made illegible. MEPs also had difficulty accessing the text messages exchanged between Ursula von der Leyen and Pfizer during the contract negotiation phase. Janine Small said that nothing had been negotiated by SMS, and that the messages in question were simply due to the teleworking phase caused by the pandemic. These explanations did not satisfy the parliamentarians in charge of the case, who pointed to Pfizer’s clear refusal to collaborate. “I think Albert Bourla deliberately did not come, because he did not want to face the controversies,” French MEP and COVI member Véronique Trillet-Lenoir told Euractiv.

Following the COVI committee vote, a new vote must take place in the CCC (Conference of Committee Chairs), which brings together all committee chairs. Several options are on the table: the duration of the exclusion, whether the sanction will apply only to Bourla or to all Pfizer representatives, or whether it is upheld at all. The final decision should not be taken for another month.

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“There is no way Russia can lose this war and no way Ukraine and NATO can possibly win it..”

Impeach ‘War Criminal’ Biden Over Ukraine – US Democrat (RT)

Geoffrey Young, who is running for governor in the US state of Kentucky, has accused Joe Biden of committing war crimes in Ukraine and other countries, saying the president should be impeached for carrying out an illegal proxy struggle against Russia in the former Soviet republic. “I think Joe Biden (D-war criminal) should be impeached immediately for war crimes in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, etc.,” Young said in a Twitter post. “Also for continuing the illegal proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. All US presidents since 1945 = war criminals (including Trump),” he added. Young, an MIT-trained economist who has worked as an environmental engineer in state government, made waves last year after winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for Kentucky’s District 6 congressional seat.

He vowed during the campaign to help prevent nuclear war with Russia by pursuing a “reasonable” peace plan with Moscow. He also called the Kiev regime a “Nazi puppet government” and said the CIA should be eliminated because it’s the “worst terrorist organization in the world today.” After Young won Kentucky’s Democratic primary in May, his party declined to support him in the November general election against incumbent Republican congressman Andy Barr. He alienated party leaders with his contrarian views, such as accusing Biden of recklessly provoking China, illegally deploying troops in Syria and Iraq, and making the US vulnerable to attack by becoming a “co-belligerent” with Ukraine against Russia.

Less than a week after the congressional midterms, the 66-year-old Young, who bills himself as a “peace Democrat,” announced his candidacy in Kentucky’s 2023 race for governor. He will try to unseat the incumbent Democrat, Governor Andy Beshear, whom he has accused of being a “not-yet-indicted felon.” Young has called the Ukraine conflict a lost cause for the US and NATO and faulted Biden’s administration for rejecting a peace proposal from Moscow in December 2021. “There is no way Russia can lose this war and no way Ukraine and NATO can possibly win it,” he said last week.

CNN Biden lies

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“There is no record that Joe or Jill Biden have ever sought to meet, let alone embrace, their grandchild..”

The Importance of Being Biden (Turley)

Hunter Biden’s disgraceful treatment of his daughter has long been on display in Arkansas where he long denied being her father, fought paternity, and was threatened with contempt of court over his failure to supply needed documents. After DNA testing was forced by a court, Hunter was found to be the father but he continued to resist efforts to force him to pay child support and supply financial records. Recently, Lunden Roberts sought to have a surname change for her daughter to Biden. Even after his long and abusive treatment of his daughter in court, Hunter Biden’s opposition is breathtaking. He opposes his daughter using his name and says that, if she does, she will never have a “peaceful existence.” Of course, Biden did not feel that way with his other four children. They are all true Bidens and living peaceful existences.

It is only Navy Joan who he does not want to bear the family name. Hunter’s concern for Navy Joan’s peaceful existence is a bit odd since he has reportedly never even seen his daughter after fighting for years to deny his paternal status and child support. While living in a luxurious mansion in Malibu, Hunter continued to fight his obligations under child support and requested in September 2022 to have the payments lowered, bemoaning how his “financial circumstances” were difficult for him. The public pays more for his security in his mansion than he does in monthly support for his daughter. Hunter is asking Circuit Court Judge Holly Meyer to deny Navy Joan the ability to use her father’s surname and claiming that it is in her best interest. The filing is so self-serving and transparently dishonest that it does what was once thought impossible: reach a new low for Hunter.

All of his reported selfies having sex and doing drugs with prostitutes were shocking. His attacks on his former sister-in-law, Hallie Biden, widow of the deceased brother (with whom Hunter later had a romantic relationship), were appalling. However, the craven effort to deny this child his name reaches a level of cad that stands unrivaled. The position of Hunter in court has been disgraceful, but the media has largely ignored the matter. It has also ignored the utter lack of support from President Joe Biden and the First Lady, who tellingly omitted a stocking for Navy Joan as one of their grandchildren. (The dog and cat did receive stockings). There is no record that Joe or Jill Biden have ever sought to meet, let alone embrace, their grandchild. The President has, however, sought to deny the child security protection (despite his son’s concern for her “peaceful existence”).

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Too big a headline without the details. “If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee..”

McCarthy Leaves Reporters Silent With Bombshell About Eric Swalwell (TPN)

On Thursday while speaking with reporters, Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy left reporters speechless after he defended his decision to keep California Democrats Eric Swalwell and Adam Schiff off of the House Intelligence Committee. “If you got the briefing I got from the FBI, you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee,” McCarthy said, leaving reporters silent. This suggests damning bombshell information about Swalwell’s handlings that we will hopefully learn in the coming weeks. “And you’re going to tell me other Democrats couldn’t fill that slot? He cannot get a security clearance in the private sector,” McCarthy said. “So would you like to give him a government clearance?”

McCarthy went on to explain that the last Congress lead by Nancy Pelosi kept Swalwell on the committee even though they were aware of the massive red flag from the FBI. “You’re going to tell me there are 200 other Democrats that couldn’t fill that slot, but they kept him on it? The only way that they even knew it came forward is when they put to nominate him to the Intel committee. And then the FBI came and told the leadership that he’s got a problem, and they kept him on. That jeopardized all of us,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy also name dropped Schiff. “Adam Schiff openly lied to the American public. He told you he had proof. He told you he didn’t know the whistle blower,” McCarthy said while referring to false claims made by the California Democrat against former President Donald Trump. “He put America for four years through an impeachment that he knew was a lie.” At the same time, we had Ukraine, the same time we had Afghanistan collapse. Was that the role of the Intel committee? No,” McCarthy said. “So what I am doing with the Intel committee, bringing it back to the jurisdiction is supposed to do forward looking to keep this country safe, keep the politics out of it,” he continued.

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Good questions. But who’s going to ask them?

Destroying American Democracy – An Inside Job (Hoekstra)

The fraudulent efforts by the U.S. government, Clapper, Brennan and the 49 others — along with Hillary Clinton, her campaign committee, the Democratic National Committee and the suppression of the media and social media — to influence the public unfortunately met with some success. For almost two years, the authenticity of the material found on Hunter Biden’s laptop was questioned. Today, its authenticity has been verified; the information is real and damning. As summarized by the New York Post: “Yes that letter from the Dirty 51 had all the classic earmarks of a disinformation operation, all right – one designed to ensure Joe Biden won the presidency. And it was essentially a CIA operation, considering 43 of the 51 signatories were former CIA.”

One final example of the Intelligence Community involving itself in domestic politics comes from the recent release of the “Twitter Files.” According to tweet #20 of the third tranche released: “This post about the Hunter Biden laptop situation shows that Roth not only met weekly with the FBI and DHS, but with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.” Tweet #17 states: “executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content.” Finally, the FBI paid Twitter $3.5 million reportedly to “handle requests from the bureau.” We now know what happened. Twitter suppressed discussion of the Hunter Biden laptop story and suppressed conservative messaging, while at the same time it appears the FBI, DHS and the ODNI had literally had set up shop at Twitter.

The American people should be outraged. This level of collaboration between federal law enforcement and a private sector company on controlling speech is terrifying. Having our Intelligence Community, which is supposed to be focused on foreign intelligence collection, involved is even more terrifying. DNI James Clapper lying to the American people in 2013 about government surveillance of them, the promoting of the Russian hoax theory in 2017 by CIA Director Brennan, DNI Clapper, FBI Director Comey and others, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by 51 former intelligence professionals, and the close working arrangement between the FBI, DHS and the ODNI in 2020-2022 raises a staggering series of questions:

Can our government, law enforcement, and the Intelligence Community still be trusted? Have those federal government agencies literally weaponized law enforcement and intelligence against political opponents in the U.S.? Has more than one solitary person — former FBI attorney Kevin Clinemith, for altering an email — been held accountable for these egregious abuses of power? Why wasn’t there a more powerful response from the Intelligence Community and the law enforcement community about the disinformation from the 51 former intelligence professionals? Who authorized the cozy relationship between law enforcement, the intelligence community with Twitter? Who in these government agencies reviewed and approved of the output and decisions coming from these joint efforts? Were political appointees in the review loop? Who has the records, notes and decisions that emanated from these groups?

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Good questions. But who’s going to ask them?

Glug Glug, Gurgle Gurgle (Kunstler)

Summon the ghost of James Comey to ‘splain’ the finer points of RussiaGate: how he fell for Hillary Clinton’s Steele Dossier prank; how he used Columbia University law professor Daniel Richman to leak info about confidential meetings with Mr. Trump; whether he ordered Peter Strzok’s sandbagging operation on Gen. Mike Flynn, the FISA court shenanigans, the hiring of CrowdStrike instead of using FBI forensic experts to vet evidence; the run-up to “Crossfire Hurricane” the roles of international men of mystery Stefan Halper and Josef Mifsud in the operations to incriminate Trump appointees, Nellie Ohr’s role as a DOJ-FBI go-between with the Fusion GPS company.

Let’s hear from former CIA director John Brennan about the “17 Intel Agencies” who swore Russia was behind 2016 election interference and then about the 50-odd distinguished intel officers and other high officials who swore that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russia put-on job. Ask former Attorney General Bill Barr to ‘splain’ if he was informed about the Hunter Biden laptop when the FBI got it in 2019. Bring back former AG Jeff Sessions to ‘splain’ how the Mueller Special Counsel’s office was stuffed with Democratic Party activist Lawfare cadres, and how he determined that Mr. Mueller was mentally up to the job. Bring in Mr. Mueller to ‘splain’ how he testified that in the two-year course of his inquiry he never heard of the company Fusion GPS.

Find a special booster chair for Merrick Garland to ‘splain’ how come so many January 6 suspects are being held indefinitely pre-trial in the DC lockup on rinky-dink charges under the harshest conditions (solitary confinement, denial of medical care) in defiance of due process of law, in particular the constitutional right to a speedy trial. Ask Mr. Garland why he’s devoting vast resources of the DOJ to pursue ever more January 6 protesters on Mickey Mouse charges. Ask him to ‘splain’ how it came to pass that he went after parents protesting at school boards about indecent sex ed for little children and racist anti-white indoctrination. Ask him about sending SWAT teams on predawn raids to the homes of investigation targets whose lawyers volunteered to deliver them to the FBI offices. Ask him why he appointed a RussiaGate-involved lawyer, one Robert K Hur, as Special Counsel in the “Joe Biden” classified document matter.

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The EU doesn’t even have time to do this. It would take ten years.

“..in 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin first voiced his concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion and warned that a unipolar model was not only “unacceptable, but outright impossible” for the modern world..”

EU Needs ‘War Economy’ – Veteran German Diplomat (RT)

The EU must drastically ramp up the production of ammunition and heavy weapons if it wants to help Ukraine succeed in the conflict with Russia, Wolfgang Ischinger, the former chair of the Munich Security Conference and a veteran German diplomat, said on Saturday. He stressed that Kiev’s supporters would run out of supplies unless they transform their economies. “There is much to suggest that this war is far from over. Therefore, it is necessary for us to plan for the long term,” Ischinger stressed in an interview with Germany’s Welt newspaper. “All the military experts I know are saying that stocks of old Soviet weapons and respective ammunition are running out.” “Ukraine is forced to fire as much ammunition per day as we are producing in half a year. The end of our stocks is in sight. What comes next? Who handles replenishment? A war economy means that we – within NATO and in coordination at a European level – take the initiative and call on European armaments companies to produce more weapons and more ammunition as a result of the war.”

Ischinger said that the supplying and resupplying of Ukraine with heavy weapons, such as tanks, missiles, air defense systems, and drones, should be “controlled and coordinated” by the EU, as well as by the governments of individual member states. He added that regular meetings of Western countries that support Kiev with arms and military equipment at the US Ramstein Air Base in Germany are not enough. “They are certainly very helpful, but we need a political prioritization so the industry would have necessary specifications,” he said. Moscow has repeatedly urged the collective West to stop “pumping” Ukraine with weapons, maintaining that doing so will only prolong the hostilities and the suffering of common Ukrainians, rather than change the ultimate outcome of the conflict.

From 2008 to 2022, Ischinger served as chairman of the Munich Security Conference, the largest annual multinational security policy event of its kind. The conference was the platform where, back in 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin first voiced his concerns about NATO’s eastward expansion and warned that a unipolar model was not only “unacceptable, but outright impossible” for the modern world. Now a proponent of even further militarization of Europe, Ischinger previously had a hand in the Ukrainian turmoil as well. In early 2014, he was tapped by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to become its representative tasked with establishing a ‘dialogue’ in Ukraine following the Maidan coup, which toppled the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovich and ushered in the years-long conflict in the country’s east.

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Made up from whole cloth. No Apaches, no Hellfires. Just stories.

London Rejects Ukraine Helicopters Claim (RT)

The British government has denied a media report claiming that it would supply Ukraine with AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, Sky News stated on Sunday. The UK still intends to donate a handful of tanks and artillery guns. In an article that has since been deleted, the Sunday People, an outlet that shares a website with The Mirror, claimed that the arrival of the US-made choppers would be “a major game-changer” for Ukraine’s forces, which recently lost the strategically important Donbass town of Soledar to Russian forces, sustaining horrific losses in the process. Citing an unnamed “senior defense source,” the paper said that “other NATO members will now follow suit” and donate their own helicopters. However, the article was “incorrect,” the Ministry of Defence told Sky News correspondent Deborah Haynes.


While the Ukrainian military will not get its hands on the Apaches, the UK still intends to ship a squadron of 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Kiev “in the coming weeks,” as well as “around 30” AS-90 self-propelled artillery guns. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s office confirmed the arms package on Saturday, and Defence Secretary Ben Wallace is expected to announce further details on Monday. Ukraine has yet to receive any Western-designed combat aircraft from its NATO backers, despite repeated pleas from Kiev for fighter jets in particular. Aside from the challenge of training Ukrainian pilots to fly the machine, the Apache is noted for “frequent failures of key components and high demands for maintenance,” according to a US government report. The report found that in order to keep the Apache flying in combat environments, the US military “relied heavily on contractors” to “keep up with the maintenance burden.”

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“Further weapons packages will likely be announced after the US-led ‘Defense Contact Group’ meets on Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany..”

NATO Promises More Heavy Weapons For Ukraine (RT)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on Saturday that Ukraine would receive more “heavy warfare equipment” from the West in “the near future.” The UK has already pledged tanks to the country, and Germany is under pressure to follow suit. A US-led ‘contact group’ for arming Ukraine will meet on Friday. “We are in a crucial phase of the war,” Stoltenberg told Germany’s Handelsblatt newspaper on Sunday, days after Ukraine lost the strategically important Donbass town of Soledar to Russian forces. “We are experiencing heavy fighting,” the NATO chief continued. “It is therefore important that we equip Ukraine with the weapons it needs to be able to win.” Recent weeks have seen a dramatic escalation in the equipment promised to Ukraine by NATO’s largest powers.

The US, France, and Germany simultaneously announced at the beginning of the month that they would donate infantry fighting vehicles to the Ukrainian military, while the UK officially confirmed on Saturday that it would send fourteen Challenger 2 main battle tanks. “The recent pledges for heavy warfare equipment are important, and I expect more in the near future,” Stoltenberg told Handelsblatt. Further weapons packages will likely be announced after the US-led ‘Defense Contact Group’ meets on Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. This panel of nearly 50 countries has met seven times already since Russia’s military operation in Ukraine began last February, with each meeting followed by fresh pledges of military aid from America and its allies.

One of the first meetings in May was followed by deliveries of anti-ship missiles from Denmark, helicopters from the Czech Republic, and artillery systems from Italy, Greece, Norway, and Poland. The group’s last meeting in November came as the US announced a $400 million aid package, including surface-to-air missiles. Although Stoltenberg insists that he does not want “a full-blown war between NATO and Russia,” Moscow has repeatedly warned the West that its continued arms deliveries will only prolong the conflict in Ukraine, while making the Western powers de-facto participants. Russian President Vladimir Putin has described the conflict as one between Russia and “the entire Western military machine,” but said on Saturday that the progress of Moscow’s military operation is “positive,” with the battlefield situation “developing within the framework of the Defense Ministry’s and the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s plan.”

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“..Arestovich retracted his apology shortly after, stating he re-watched his interview and deemed it to be carefully-worded and vague enough..”

Zelensky Aide Flip-flops On Apartment Block Blast (RT)

The partial destruction of a residential building in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Dnepr has triggered a bitter spat between the country’s top officials, struggling to explain the exact causes of the incident. The scandal was prompted by the assessment offered by Aleksey Arestovich, a senior advisor to President Vladimir Zelensky, who said that the Russian missile might have been brought down by Ukrainian troops and ended up hitting the building. The site was heavily damaged on Saturday, with some 25 civilians killed and 73 injured, according to Ukrainian authorities. “It was shot down. It apparently fell on the [apartment] block. But it exploded when falling,” Arestovich said in a YouTube interview.

The assessment immediately came under fire, with Arestovich ending up accused of discrediting Ukraine’s military and assigning blame for the incident on it. The mayor of Dnepr, Boris Filatov, got particularly enraged by his statements, branding the presidential aide “a narcissistic animal and a foul mouth,” and urging the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) and counterintelligence to “react.” The spat prompted the country’s military to provide its own explanation of the incident, with the Ukrainian Air Force command identifying the Russian projectile that allegedly hit the building as a Kh-22, a supersonic air-launched cruise missile. The military bizarrely claimed in an official statement that it has no weaponry to bring down the missiles of the type altogether, with more than 210 Kh-22s making it through the country’s air defenses amid the ongoing conflict.

Separately, the spokesman for the Air Force, Colonel Yury Ignat, admitted on Facebook that earlier reports of Ukrainian forces shooting down Kh-22 missiles might have been inaccurate. The barrage of criticism made Arestovich offer an apology over his statements, with the official claiming he got the information from his acquaintance, a retired anti-aircraft officer, who purportedly witnessed the incident. Zelensky’s aide said he should have stated more explicitly that his assessment was merely a “version” rather than the ultimate truth. However, Arestovich retracted his apology shortly after, stating he re-watched his interview and deemed it to be carefully-worded and vague enough. He also blamed the forced explanation by the military on his critics, who preferred to rage over his remarks rather than highlight “Russia’s guilt.”

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Most of these people have family and friends “on the other side”.

“I have not formed any particular opinion on the matter, except for what I have already said: I observe with compassion the tragic events in my beloved Ukraine,” Konchalovsky said.”

Zelensky Rolls Out New Anti-Russian Sanctions (RT)

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky signed a decree on Sunday, imposing personal sanctions on some 198 Russian nationals. The new list includes multiple prominent artists, journalists and other public figures. Kiev targeted award-winning director Andrey Konchalovsky and former governor of Moscow Region Boris Gromov, as well as several RT journalists and multiple bloggers. Commenting on getting on the blacklist, Konchalovsky told the RIA Novosti news agency that a “historical dazzle of large masses of people” was nothing new, but an eventual awakening of them was inevitable. “I have not formed any particular opinion on the matter, except for what I have already said: I observe with compassion the tragic events in my beloved Ukraine,” Konchalovsky said.

The restrictions imposed for a 10-year period include freeze of assets, travel and visa bans, stripping of Ukrainian state awards, and some other measures. The move comes one week after Zelensky decreed personal sanctions against 119 Russian public figures, including opera star Anna Netrebko, Oscar-winning film director Nikita Mikhalkov and pop singer Philipp Kirkorov. The Ukrainian president also targeted Russian journalists, including RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan and Dmitry Kiselyov, the head of the Rossiya Segodnya media group. Kiev has repeatedly sanctioned Russian nationals amid the ongoing conflict with Mosciw, blacklisting hundreds of people.

Russia sent troops into Ukraine on February 24, 2022, citing Kiev’s failure to implement the Minsk agreements, designed to give Donetsk and Lugansk special status within the Ukrainian state. The protocols, brokered by Germany and France, were first signed in 2014. Former Ukrainian president Pyotr Poroshenko has since admitted that Kiev’s main goal was to use the ceasefire to buy time and “create powerful armed forces.” Shortly before the hostilities broke out, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc. Last September, Donetsk and Lugansk, as well as Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, were incorporated into Russia following referendums.

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“It’s absolutely fair for me to wish for all Russians and Russia to be wiped off the face of the Earth,” Podoliak tweeted. “It’s not hate speech, it’s not horrible of me, it’s just FAIR.”

Ukrainian Blogger Calls For Genocide Of All Russians (RT)

Ukrainian blogger Melania Podoliak, a prominent guest on Western news channels, has demanded that Russia and its people be “wiped off the face of the earth.” Podoliak issued her call for genocide on Saturday after her own country’s air defense supposedly caused a Russian missile to hit an apartment block. “It’s absolutely fair for me to wish for all Russians and Russia to be wiped off the face of the Earth,” Podoliak tweeted. “It’s not hate speech, it’s not horrible of me, it’s just FAIR.” Podoliak shared an image of an apartment block in the eastern Ukrainian city of Dnepr, which she said was destroyed “after [a] Russian missile attack.” While Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky said that the building was hit by a Russian missile, his adviser, Aleksey Arestovich, admitted afterwards that the missile was shot down by a Ukrainian anti-air weapon, which caused it to hit the building.


Commenters on Twitter hammered Podoliak for being “pro-ethnic cleansing,” but the Ukrainian blogger stood by her statement, responding to critics with expletives. In a follow-up tweet on Sunday, she described Arestovich as “a f**king moron.” Before calling for the deaths of 143 million people, Podoliak was lauded in the West. A former staffer in Ukraine’s parliament, she has been featured on NBC News as a “political activist” demanding the West send heavy weapons to Kiev, and on Fox News as a “media consultant” calling for sanctions on Moscow. On her YouTube channel, she offers viewers links to donate money to the Ukrainian military. Russia’s defense ministry said on Sunday that Saturday’s missile barrage targeted “the military command and control system of Ukraine and associated energy facilities.” Moscow has repeatedly denied targeting civilians, stating that the missile campaign was launched against Ukrainian military and infrastructure targets in response to Ukraine’s “terrorist” attacks on its own infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge.

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White deer

 

 


«A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness»
—Albert Einstein

 

 

 

 

Calf

 

 

 

 

Dog scoop
https://twitter.com/i/status/1614440440341712896

 

 

Dog slide

 

 

 

 

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Jun 122022
 
 June 12, 2022  Posted by at 8:27 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  26 Responses »


Caravaggio The seven works of mercy (Sette opere di Misericordia) 1607

 

Pitchforks Soon In Europe? (Vilches)
No Ammo, More Casualties, Thin Lines, Propaganda And Passing The Buck (MoA)
Biden Throws Zelensky Under The Bus (ZH)
Ukraine Slams Biden’s Comments on Zelensky Not Heeding Warnings (NW)
Ukraine Fears It Might Lose Western Support Over ‘War Fatigue’ (Antiwar)
EU Will Likely Grant Ukraine Candidate Status To Join Bloc – Von Der Leyen (G.)
Pentagon Finally Admits Running 46 Biolabs In Ukraine (GGI)
The Warmonger’s Legacy (CGTN)
How The Jan. 6 Committee Undermined Its Own Legitimacy (Turley)
Comey Lied to Congress’ ‘Gang of 8’ Over Russiagate (Sperry)
Biden’s Homeland Secretary Lied Under Oath About Disinformation Board (ET)
Smoking (AGAIN): It’s NOT Transitory (Denninger)
Britain’s Dire Economic Outlook (O.)
A New Molecule That Kills Even The Deadliest Cancer (IE)
Headwind2 – The Debate – Malone and Vanden Bossche (Headwind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stunt

 

 

 

 

“It´d be plenty enough for Russia to just shut off your nat-gas supply, period. And not even to the whole of Europe.”

Pitchforks Soon In Europe? (Vilches)

Dear Europeans For your own children´s sake — on my knees and with my saddened eyes humbly looking downwards — I beg of you to please stop the current self-destructive nonsense dead in its tracks by immediately demanding from your political class to import the bloody Russian oil normally once again as Europe had been doing for dozens of years. The impact that the ban on Russian oil has upon your daily lives now and for years yonder is such that at the very least a Referendum should have been held. But it was not, and without consultation, the EU leadership acted on their own. Please be advised that the EU un-elected brass simply does not represent you or your needs. They were all voted amongst themselves into their positions like members of a committee in a private country club.

If left unchecked, EU politicians will now continue misrepresenting you and, on your behalf — with your hard-earned assets and livelihoods – will keep on picking a most unnecessary and prolonged armed conflict with Russia, eventually forcing upon you a total war scenario where chances play out all very strongly against you, with Russia probably resulting unscathed. European leaders crave for their war, so they can´t think of a better way to provoke it than by applying ever larger and ´meaner´ sanctions on Russia as if (a) sanctions were effective and (b) as if Europe could win such war (not). Accordingly, we now have yet another set of spanking new EU “sanctions” in package No. 6 that will eventually backfire flat on Europe´s face – like all the others — such as banning the insurance and financing of oil tankers that carry Russian oil. Accordingly, the EU is now trying its very best to

(1) bankrupt the successful Western oil tanker insurance business by reducing the number of participants
(2) induce higher shipping and insurance costs worldwide by reducing the number of participants
(3) foster the development of yet another Russian import substitution service namely oil tanker insurance & financing
(4) seriously hinder the world´s economy by not allowing deliveries of any oil tankers carrying Russian oil anywhere (EU or non-EU) thus cutting off some 15% of the world´s oil supply from the world market and necessarily sending its price yet higher with yet more EU-induced inflation as if we had not had enough already, please brace for it.
(5) force the construction of a new Russian-Chinese-Indian oil tanker fleet leaving idle part of today´s fleet
(6) tempt Russia to embargo strategic value-chain upstream items with captive consumers cascading into multiple failures thru lack of nat-gas, rare earths, inert gases, potash, sulfur, uranium, palladium, vanadium, cobalt, coke, etc.

Russia does not need to fire a single shot or land a single missile on European territories to win such a total war. Think tanks in Europe and elsewhere know this but say nothing. It´d be plenty enough for Russia to just shut off your nat-gas supply, period. And not even to the whole of Europe. It could possibly be to only, say, some limited area in Germany. But you need not put up with any of this. Europe should already have learned from history books and its generals not to underestimate or discriminate against Russia. Let alone cheat on it repeatedly as Europe has done since the downfall of the former Soviet Union. Yet again, history will not be kind to anyone directly or indirectly involved, including yourselves.

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“Zelensky did not listen to us and he didn’t inform us how bad the war was going,” will become the standard line as soon as the Ukrainian army is on the run.”

No Ammo, More Casualties, Thin Lines, Propaganda And Passing The Buck (MoA)

To match Russia’s 50,000 rounds per day, with each round weighing 50 kilograms, some 2,500 metric tons of ammunition would have to be moved per day from Ukraine’s western border to the east. After reaching some railhead in the east they would have to be loaded on some 350 trucks to be distributed while being under fire from long ranging Russian weapons. This would have to happen each and every day. The U.S. has large depots of ammunition but even those would be emptied within a few month if no large scale production of new rounds would be happening. Munition production is usually done only on a small but steady scale of a few hundred rounds per week. The west would have to scale up production to allow for the supply Ukraine would need to match Russia.

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense Ukraine’s artillery has lost 506 multiple launch rocket systems and 1,859 field artillery and mortars since the beginning of the war. The daily reported number of pieces hit have changed over time from 50+ per day to now single digits. The total numbers in the Russia report are too high (as they usually are in similar ‘western’ reports). They amount to more than what the Ukraine had at the start of the war. But we can safely guess that more than 90% of Ukraine’s guns and missile systems have been destroyed. Meanwhile the ‘west’ has promised the Ukraine some 200 gun and some 50 missile systems. Half of those are former soviet types. The other half are newer and need ‘western’ ammunition. They seem to arrive only in trickles.

The U.S. has send some 100 M-777 lightweight howitzers. Only a few have been seen at the front in the east and some were already destroyed there. Others are used to fire on non-military targets in Donetsk city. We can guess where the rest is. The M-777 is lightweight (4.2 metric tons) because it is largely made from titanium which has a ten times higher scrap value than steel. Some entrepreneurs in Ukraine’s west seem to have found that recycling the guns (or selling them elsewhere) is of more value than sending them to the east where they would surely be destroyed within a few days. Ten days ago the Ukrainian comedian and president Zelensky had admitted that some 60 to 100 Ukrainian soldiers are getting killed per day. That number was highly qualified and an advisor to Zelensky has now doubled it:

“A senior Ukrainian presidential aide has told the BBC that between 100 and 200 Ukrainian troops are being killed on the front line every day. Mykhaylo Podolyak said Ukraine needed hundreds of Western artillery systems to level the playing field with Russia in the eastern Donbas region.” The real numbers are certainly higher than anything the Zelensky regime will ever admit. In a World War I like artillery dominated conflict (but without gas attacks) the number of wounded to dead is historically some 4 to 1 with one of the wounded additionally dying later from his wounds. This historic ‘sanitation deaths’ rate of wounded later dying from their wounds has since been halved by the use of antibiotics. But in Ukraine it may well be higher than usual in modern wars as its medical infrastructure is in a quite bad shape and as many medical personnel have fled the country.

Read more …

This is no coincidence. They’re looking to save face.

Biden Throws Zelensky Under The Bus (ZH)

President Joe Biden on Friday told a donors conference in Los Angeles, California on the sidelines of the Summit of the Americas that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky brushed aside US warnings saying a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. He described of the situation ahead of the Feb.24 invasion and his communications with Zelensky, according to The Associated Press: “Nothing like this has happened since World War II. I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating,” Biden said, according to the outlet. He added the US had data that showed Russian President Vladimir Putin was going to invade. “There was no doubt,” Biden continued. “And Zelenskyy didn’t want to hear it.”

Biden in the fresh remarks admitted that the possibility of Putin launching a full-scale invasion may have seemed far-fetched at the time, acknowledging, “I understand why they didn’t want to hear it.” Top Ukrainian officials in the days and weeks prior to the invasion had pushed back against Washington, blaming the repeat warnings from US intelligence agencies for sowing “panic”. At that time, Zelensky had even personally told Biden to “calm down the messaging” on the invasion fears. Rarely does US intelligence take its classified assessments public in order to preemptively warn of action it predicts will occur. This highly unusual public stance also fueled widespread skepticism of the constant invasion warnings from the administration even among longtime Russia experts and observers.

It has since been revealed in recent testimony by US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines that Biden had taken the rare step of declassifying intelligence related to the prepared invasion in order to convince skeptical allies that it was likely going to happen. Down to the last days before the invasion, there was hope among many Western officials of an “off ramp” that might quickly de-escalate the situation amid the Russian and Belarusian troop build-up along Ukraine’s eastern and northern borders. Indeed this “off-ramp” might have come in the form of Ukraine and its backers pledging that the ex-Soviet state would never join NATO.

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“I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it..”

Ukraine Slams Biden’s Comments on Zelensky Not Heeding Warnings (NW)

Aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky have responded to Joe Biden’s comment that the Ukrainian president “didn’t want to hear” American warnings before Russia’s invasion. Speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser in Los Angeles on Friday, the president said that the U.S. knew before the start of the war on February 24 that Vladimir Putin was going “to go in, off the border.” “Nothing like this has happened since World War II,” Biden said, according to the Associated Press. “But I knew we had data” that showed Putin’s intent. “I know a lot of people thought I was maybe exaggerating and Zelensky didn’t want to hear it,” Biden added.

Zelensky’s spokesman Sergei Nikiforov said the Ukrainian leader had “three or four telephone conversations” with Biden before the war started, during which they discussed assessments of the situation in detail. “Therefore, the phrase ‘didn’t want to hear’ probably needs to be clarified,” Nikiforov told Russian-language Ukrainian news outlet LIGA.net. “In addition, if you remember, the president of Ukraine called on partners to introduce a package of preventive sanctions in order to encourage Russia to withdraw troops and de-escalate the situation. “Here we can already say that our partners ‘did not want to hear us,'” Nikiforov said.

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podolyak told the same news outlet that Biden’s comments were “not entirely true” and that Kyiv had been “well aware that Russia was developing various expansion scenarios.” “[Volodymyr] Zelensky always had relevant analytics on his desk, based on high-quality intelligence,” he said. “The president also carefully reacted to all the words and warnings of our partners.” Podolyak said that Ukraine understood that Russia was planning an invasion and was preparing for it. The question, he said, was over its scale. “It is absurd to blame a country that has been resisting a superior aggressor for more than 100 days when key countries were unable to prevent the Russian Federation [from invading],” he added.

Although Zelensky has been hailed around the world for his wartime leadership, there are question marks over his preparation for the war, the AP reported. Weeks before Putin invaded, Zelensky took exception to warnings by the Biden administration about a possible Russian invasion, fearing it would harm Ukraine’s economy. On Saturday, Zelensky told the Shangri-La Dialogue Asian security summit in Singapore that the war had consequences for the global order. “It is on the battlefields of Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided,” he said via video link. He also said that his country’s forces are facing fierce Russian attacks in the country’s east, particularly around the city of Severodonetsk.

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“Zelensky has made clear that his goal is to drive Russia out of the territory it has captured since February 24..”

Ukraine Fears It Might Lose Western Support Over ‘War Fatigue’ (Antiwar)

As the war in Ukraine drags on, Ukrainian officials fear that Kyiv might lose some Western support due to “war fatigue,” The Associated Press reported on Friday. The US and its allies have committed billions of dollars in weapons, but some Western European leaders have been calling for a negotiated solution to end the fighting, an idea Ukrainian officials have rejected. “The fatigue is growing, people want some kind of outcome [that is beneficial] for themselves, and we want [another] outcome for ourselves,” Zelensky said. The current situation on the battlefield is not looking good for Ukraine. An advisor to Zelensky said Thursday that they are losing between 100 and 200 troops each day as Russia continues to make slow but steady gains in the east.


Zelensky has made clear that his goal is to drive Russia out of the territory it has captured since February 24, which would require a massive military offensive. While there is some sentiment among European leaders for Ukraine to make concessions to Russia to achieve peace, top US and NATO officials are encouraging Ukraine to keep fighting. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said last week that Ukraine shouldn’t drop the goal of driving Russia out of all of its territory, including Crimea, which Russia has controlled since 2014. Stoltenberg also said last week that the Western military alliance should be prepared to support Ukraine for the “long haul.”

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Too much resistance. And it would end the EU if it incorporates such corruption.

EU Will Likely Grant Ukraine Candidate Status To Join Bloc – Von Der Leyen (G.)

The EU executive will next week make a recommendation on whether Ukraine should be given candidate status to join the bloc, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, has said. Such a recommendation would be a preliminary step on a long road to full membership, and Ukraine would need the backing of all 27 EU governments before candidate status was given. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has been pushing for rapid admission into the EU to provide the country with more security since the Russian invasion. “We want to support Ukraine in its European journey,” Von der Leyen said in a joint press conference with Zelenskiy on a surprise visit to Kyiv on Saturday. Heavy fighting is continuing in the eastern Donbas region, where Russia has been making incremental gains.

“The discussions today will enable us to finalise the assessment by the end of next week,” Von der Leyen added, saying that the Ukrainian authorities had “done a lot” towards a candidacy, but that there was “still need for reforms to be implemented, to fight corruption for example”. Speaking alongside Von der Leyen, Zelenskiy said that the EU’s decision on Ukraine would “determine” the future of Europe. “It is now being determined what the future of a united Europe will be, and whether there will be a future at all. A positive response from the European Union to the Ukrainian application will signify a positive answer to the question of whether the European project has a future at all,” he said. “All of Europe is a target for Russia, and Ukraine is just the first stage in this aggression,” he added.

Since Russia’s invasion on the 24 February, senior EU officials, including Von der Leyen, who was making her second trip to Kyiv since the start of the war, have spoken in favour of putting Ukraine on a speedy path to the EU accession by granting it candidate status. And while a number of EU states including Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have backed these calls, there are still doubts in Berlin and Paris and other western European capitals over whether it is possible to begin the formal process already. On Thursday, Bloomberg, citing a diplomatic note, reported that Denmark believed Kyiv did not sufficiently fulfil the criteria to apply to join the EU, saying that the country “would need to fundamentally improve its legislative and institutional framework”.

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“46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.”

i.e. they were already there when Yanukovich was president.

Pentagon Finally Admits Running 46 Biolabs In Ukraine (GGI)

In a recent document, the Pentagon admitted to running 46 biolabs in Ukraine but says they are peaceful efforts to improve nuclear and radiological safety and security, disease surveillance, chemical safety and security, and readiness to respond to epidemics and pandemics such as COVID-19. According to the Pentagon, the US government has funded 46 biological research facilities in Ukraine over the last 20 years, but only as part of a peaceful public health endeavor rather than to develop weapons. Russia and China have been accused by the US military of “spreading disinformation and sowing mistrust” about its efforts to rid the world of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a document titled ‘Fact Sheet on WMD Threat Reduction Efforts,’ the US Department of Defense for the first time revealed the specific number of such facilities its government has sponsored in Ukraine.

According to the Pentagon, the US has “worked collaboratively to improve Ukraine’s biological safety, security, and disease surveillance for both human and animal health,” by providing support to “46 peaceful Ukrainian laboratories, health facilities, and disease diagnostic sites over the last two decades.” These programs have focused on “improving public health and agricultural safety measures at the nexus of nonproliferation.” The Pentagon insisted that the work of these biolabs was “often” carried out in collaboration with organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), and that it was “consistent with international best practices and norms in publishing research results, partnering with international colleagues and multilateral organizations, and widely distributing their research and public health findings.”

Only three laboratories in Ukraine had the required safety criteria to undertake the type of research they were doing, according to the Russian military last month. Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of the Radioactive, Chemical, and Biological Protection Forces, referenced Ukrainian government sources to point to a series of problems at one of those sites in Odessa, as an example. The Russian military has given evidence of the Pentagon’s role in funding laboratories in Ukraine in a series of briefings that began in March. Kirillov accused Kiev of carrying out “inhumane experiments” on Ukrainian patients and of launching a biological attack against the breakaway territory of Lugansk in early May. Other evidence suggests that when Russia moved soldiers into Ukraine in February, attempts were made to weaponize drones to spread pathogens and to destroy compromising materials.

Between 2005 and early 2022, the US poured more than $224 million into biological research in Ukraine, according to Russia’s Investigative Committee. According to Moscow, the conspiracy involved Western pharmaceutical giants, organizations, and even the Democratic Party of the United States.

George Webb

Read more …

From China.

The Warmonger’s Legacy (CGTN)

Six hundred and twenty thousand civilians died in the Vietnam War, yet they have never received justice… Iraq was invaded, accused of developing weapons of mass destruction, yet this has been shown to be a lie. And for 20 years Afghanistan was a battleground in the war on terror, yet ultimately the Taliban regained power. Lies, self-interest and profit have created a vast web of international conflict, devastating the lands and peoples caught in it. And the responsibility rests with one country alone. The documentary “The Warmonger’s Legacy” reveals the shocking truth.

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“..for 230 years, Congress maintained the need for bipartisan membership..”

How The Jan. 6 Committee Undermined Its Own Legitimacy (Turley)

In 1924, Lord Gordon Hewart famously declared, “Justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” The lord chief justice of England, he believed that even a small allegation of possible bias by a court clerk meant justice was not seen to be done and, thus, was not done. Lord Hewart’s quote came to mind while watching the opening night of the House’s Jan. 6 select committee public hearings. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decided a year ago to break from tradition and blocked two Republican committee members selected by GOP leaders. In response, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) pulled his other committee nominees, and Pelosi then seated two staunchly anti-Trump Republicans — Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyoming) and Adam Kinzinger (Illinois).

Congress has a long history of bipartisan investigatory and select committees. Many were formed during deep political rifts — yet, for 230 years, Congress maintained the need for bipartisan membership. That was the case with the Watergate committees, the House Committee on Assassinations, the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, the House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions and other investigations. It would have been easy to stack the decks and limit the members by party on each of those committees, but past congressional leaders understood that the credibility of such investigations required balance, including opposing views. Pelosi’s decision to gut that process was something of a signature muscle play.

As a witness in the first Trump impeachment, I was highly critical of her insistence that the House would impeach before Christmas rather than conduct the traditional impeachment investigation with witnesses. Instead of building a more convincing case, Pelosi preferred to impeach with virtually no record, for a certain defeat in the Senate. In the second impeachment, she went one better: She held no hearing at all and pushed through the first “snap impeachment.” The Jan. 6 committee was similarly stripped of any pretense. It was as subtle a political move as Pelosi’s ripping up President Trump’s State of the Union speech. Asked what she hoped to achieve from the committee on the first day of hearings, Pelosi tellingly referred to it as a “narrative.” It is the difference between seeing and simulating justice.

According to The New York Times, that narrative is meant to “recast the midterm message” and “give [Democrats] a platform for making a broader case about why they deserve to stay in power.” It was packaged with the help of a high-powered media figure brought in to help stage the event. Much of the media touted how the hearings would be “must-see TV” and would force voters “not to look away” from Trump’s “coup.” Countervailing evidence was edited out. Thus, Trump was shown calling for the protesters to “march” on the Capitol — but not his additional words to do so “peacefully.”

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So many of these people have lied, where to begin?

Comey Lied to Congress’ ‘Gang of 8’ Over Russiagate (Sperry)

The FBI deceived the House, Senate and the Justice Department about the substance and strength of evidence undergirding its counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, according to a recently declassified document and other material. A seven-page internal FBI memo dated March 8, 2017, shows that “talking points” prepared for then-FBI Director James Comey for his meeting the next day with the congressional leadership were riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions. Both the Senate and the House opened investigations and held hearings based in part on the misrepresentations made in those FBI briefings, one of which was held in the Senate that morning and the other in the House later that afternoon.

[..] The talking points were prepared by Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer who later resigned from the bureau amid accusations of anti-Trump bias, and were used by Comey in his meeting with Hill leaders. They described reports the FBI received in 2016 from “a former FBI CHS,” or confidential human source, about former Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page) allegedly conspiring with the Kremlin to hack the election. Quoting from the reports, Comey told congressional leaders that the unidentified informant told the FBI that Manafort “initially ‘managed’ the relationship between Russian government officials and the Trump campaign, using Carter Page as an intermediary.”

He also told them that “Page was reported to have had ‘secret meetings’ in early July 2016 with a named individual in Russia’s presidential administration during which they discussed Russia’s release of damaging information on Hillary Clinton in exchange for alterations to the GOP platform regarding U.S. policy towards Ukraine.” But previous FBI interviews with Carter Page and other key sources indicated that none of that was true – and the FBI knew it at the time of the congressional briefings. The Lisa Page memo anticipated concerns about the quality of information Comey was relaying to Congress and suggested he preempt any concerns with another untruth. The memo advised Comey to tell lawmakers that “some” of the reporting “has been corroborated,” and to point out that the informant’s “reporting in this matter is derived primarily from a Russian-based source,” which made it sound more credible.

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Under oath. In the Senate. And he still has his job?

Biden’s Homeland Secretary Lied Under Oath About Disinformation Board (ET)

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas misled Congress when he testified under oath in May that the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) “had not yet begun its work,” two Republican senators claim. In fact—according to documents obtained from a DHS whistleblower by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)—planning, decision-making, and concrete work by senior DHS officials, including Mayorkas, had begun at least as early as September 2021. In addition, the documents provided to the senators show that Mayorkas was asked by DHS officials tasked with planning and establishing the DGB for his approval to proceed as early as January 2022 and that Mayorkas gave his approval for doing so in February 2022.

“On May 4, 2022, Secretary Mayorkas testified under oath to Senator Hawley that the Disinformation Governance Board ‘had not yet begun its work.’ “On May 1, 2022, the secretary told the news media that the board would be focused on disinformation ‘from foreign state adversaries [and] the cartels’ and would not monitor American citizens,” the GOP senators said in a joint statement. “At the White House on May 2, White House press secretary Jen Psaki claimed that the board would be focused on ‘human traffickers and other transnational criminal organizations.’” Despite those claims by Mayorkas and Psaki, Grassley and Hawley said in their statement that the documents they were provided reveal a different picture of the DGB’s development.

The documents said the DGB was conceived from the beginning in part to monitor the domestic speech of U.S. citizens concerning “conspiracy theories about the validity and security of elections” and “disinformation related to the origins and effects of COVID-19 vaccines or the efficacy of masks.” They added that Mayorkas and his team sought a partnership with social media outlet Twitter designed to censor content unapproved by the DGB and planned a meeting with Twitter executives to discuss such a joint effort.

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“..what Biden has done since being in office is add another monstrous inflationary impulse which has not yet shown up in the general price level..”

Smoking (AGAIN): It’s NOT Transitory (Denninger)

I hope you like bad things and bad times; they’re coming. “The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 1.0 percent in May on a seasonally adjusted basis after rising 0.3 percent in April, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 8.6 percent before seasonal adjustment. The increase was broad-based, with the indexes for shelter, gasoline, and food being the largest contributors. After declining in April, the energy index rose 3.9 percent over the month with the gasoline index rising 4.1 percent and the other major component indexes also increasing. The food index rose 1.2 percent in May as the food at home index increased 1.4 percent.”

As Chief noted on Stocks-n-Jocks yesterday the monetary aggregates have stopped skyrocketing. What’s not being said is why they skyrocketed in the first place — which is that all spending bills originate in the House and all Fed Action when it comes to monetary aggregates are based there, and only there, because without deficit spending The Fed has nothing to operate against. It is also known that it takes time for inflation to go through the economy. And much depends on where government spending goes. If government spends money in deficit to build a highway, for example, and that construction causes efficiency in business to increase by more than the highway cost then there is no inflationary impact. But if the spending is direct to consumption, which all of the pandemic “relief” spending was then it is all inflationary impact.

Spending collapses are thought of as “bad.” They’re not; they are often good. If you as a business owner get out over your skis and go bust that means I can come in and buy up your assets for pennies on the dollar. This means where someone else has 10% of their operating capital tied up in a building for their employees I only have 5% of mine, which means I now have a 5% cost advantage against my competitors. That, in turn, means I get to take your customers and the consumer benefits with lower prices, better goods and services — or both. Allegedly “protecting” the economy from this is, on the other hand, often through of as “good.” But protecting bloated business cost structures is bad in the intermediate and longer term because while it may look “good” it protects pricing and that, in turn, is bad for the consumer.

Unfortunately what Biden has done since being in office is add another monstrous inflationary impulse which has not yet shown up in the general price level. It will. That M2 has stopped wildly expanding is good over time but that’s 12-18 months out into the future and it presumes that Congress will stop the wildly-excessive deficit spending. May I remind you that there’s an election coming up and Congress has to pass spending bills for the next fiscal year, which starts October 1st, before said election? What do you think the odds are that they won’t add yet another spike to M2 before November?

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“..the gloomiest of all developed nations..”

Britain’s Dire Economic Outlook (O.)

Britain’s growth prospects are the gloomiest of all developed nations. The OECD predicted last week that the UK economy would not grow at all next year, the worst outlook for any OECD nation. This follows warnings in April from the IMF that the UK will experience the worst growth out of the G7 nations in 2023. After a decade of stagnant wages, it seems Britons need to resign themselves to the fact that the buoyant growth of the 2000s is but a distant memory. Every country has suffered the shock of the pandemic, followed by the spike in oil and wheat prices triggered by Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine. But other developed economies have proved more resilient, enjoying export-driven recoveries in the wake of Covid. Here in Britain, the economic malaise left exposed by the 2008 financial crisis is long term and structural.

This crisis was supposed to prompt a big economic rethink: a reckoning with Britain’s addiction to growth fuelled by rising levels of consumer debt enabled by rising house prices. The then shadow chancellor George Osborne pledged to rebalance the economy away from debt-driven growth to more productive development, driven by business investment and exports, underpinned with an expansion of the UK’s manufacturing base and a reduction in the huge regional inequalities between the south-east and the rest of the country. No such thing materialised. Instead, the least affluent areas of the country were forced to bear the biggest burden of cuts to public services, undermining their potential to attract investment.

Britain’s sluggish recovery from the financial crisis – average GDP growth in the decade after 2008 was a full percentage point lower than it was in the run-up to the year – was propelled by consumer spending and resurgent house prices. Productivity growth dropped substantially, taking Britain from second in the G7 for productivity growth pre-financial crash, to the second slowest post crash.

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ERX-41

A New Molecule That Kills Even The Deadliest Cancer (IE)

Recently, a tiny group of people with rectal cancer saw their disease vanish after experimental treatment. It was a very small trial done by doctors at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, wherein the patients took a drug called dostarlimab for six months. At the end of their trial, every single one of their tumors disappeared. Now, in another breakthrough, a new compound synthesized by Dr. Jung-Mo Ahn, a University of Texas at Dallas researcher, has been found to kill a broad spectrum of hard-to-treat cancers, including triple-negative breast cancer, leaving healthy cells unscathed. He exploited a weakness in cells that were hitherto not targeted by the other drugs.

The study, which was carried out in isolated cells, both in human cancer tissue and in human cancers grown in mice, was published in the journal Nature Cancer. Ahn, a co-corresponding author of the study and a UT Dallas associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, has been working on small molecules that target protein-protein interactions in cells for more than a decade. Previously, he had developed potential therapeutic candidate compounds for treatment-resistant breast cancer and prostate cancer. In his current research, Ahn and his colleagues tested a new compound he synthesized called ERX-41 for its effects on breast cancer cells – those that contained estrogen receptors (ERs) and those that do not.

Now, there are effective treatments for patients with ER-positive breast cancer, but only a few treatment options for patients with triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) exist. It lacks receptors for estrogen, progesterone, and human epidermal growth factor 2. TNBC is known to affect women under 40 and has worse outcomes than other types of breast cancer. “The ERX-41 compound did not kill healthy cells, but it wiped out tumor cells regardless of whether the cancer cells had estrogen receptors,” Ahn said. “In fact, it killed the triple-negative breast cancer cells better than it killed the ER-positive cells. “This was puzzling to us at the time. We knew it must be targeting something other than estrogen receptors in the TNBC cells, but we didn’t know what that was.”

Soon, the researchers discovered that ERX-41 binds to lysosomal acid lipase A (LIPA), a cellular protein. LIPA is found in a cell structure called the endoplasmic reticulum, an organelle that processes and folds proteins. “For a tumor cell to grow quickly, it has to produce a lot of proteins, and this creates stress on the endoplasmic reticulum,” Ahn said. “Cancer cells significantly overproduce LIPA, much more so than healthy cells. By binding to LIPA, ERX-41 jams the protein processing in the endoplasmic reticulum, which becomes bloated, leading to cell death.”

Read more …

Dr Malone and dr Vanden Bossche meet each other for the first time ..

Headwind2 – The Debate – Malone and Vanden Bossche (Headwind)

In this third episode of the Headwind documentary series dr Robert Malone and dr Geert Vanden Bossche debate on the pathway the virus will take, the new virulent strains the relentless vaccine boostering will produce and the crime against humanity which is the totally unnecessary Covid19 vaccination of children. Dr Malone and dr Vanden Bossche meet each other for the first time and debate on all these issues, with the stunning landscape of Southern Spain as a gorgeous backdrop.

Read more …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ted Turner: Healing the planet for profit

 

 

 

 

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Jan 302019
 


Jan van Eyck Madonna and Child at the Fountain 1439 (height: 7.4“, 19 cm)

 

It’s educational and even somewhat entertaining to observe the role of the western press in the ongoing erosion and demise of democracy in Europe. But while it’s entertaining, it also means their readers and viewers don’t get informed on what is actually happening. The media paints a picture that pleases the political world. And it it doesn’t please politicians to lift a veil here and there, too bad for the public.

The Shakespearian comedy that was performed last night in the UK House of Commons is a lovely case in point. Basically, MPs voted whether or not to allow PM Theresa May to change the Brexit deal she had told them about a hundred times couldn’t possibly be changed. Brexit has turned full-blown Groucho by now: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

It was exactly two weeks ago last night that lawmakers voted by a historic 432 to 202 count to reject May’s Brexit deal. And now they voted to a) let her change it and b) go talk to the EU about changing it though Brussels has said as often as May herself that it cannot be changed. Remember: the UK is set to leave the EU 59 days from now, and counting.

It’s like in a game of chess that has long turned into a stalemate or threefold repetition situation: you stop playing. No such luck in British politics. The only way the parliament could find ‘unity’ (in a narrow vote) was to agree to ditch the Irish backstop that is an integral part of why the EU accepted May’s deal to begin with.

There are/are even serious voices saying Ireland should leave the EU along with the UK, to make it easier for the latter to do what the former absolutely doesn’t want. That’s also part of the kind of mindset in which this plays out. Brexit has turned into a complete delusion, in which bickering and blame-games have been more important than practical solutions, for all sides.

A hard Brexit is used as some ultimate deterrent, and 59 days before the big moment it may actually turn into the disaster some Project Fear or another has been talking about for over 2.5 years. If that time has been used the way it should have, adapting deals, agreements, contracts, laws, all might have been fine(r).

What the role of May’s opposition in all this consists of is ever more confusing. It certainly never was to profile itself or come up with original ideas. In the process, Jeremy Corbyn appears to have hurt his reputation as much, if not more, than May. Quite the achievement. And now May says Corbyn “has no plan for Brexit”, but she does: only, it was voted down in the largest defeat in modern parliamentary history.

And then all of a sudden, as everyone is busy doing something else, Britain finds itself in a huge crisis of democracy.

 

Over Two Thirds Of UK Public Don’t Feel Represented By Political Parties

More than two thirds of the British public feel they are not represented by the main political parties, according to a new report on the divisions caused by Brexit. Research by campaign group Hope Not Hate found that the disconnect had increased from 60% to 67% over the last six months as Theresa May negotiated the EU withdrawal agreement.

The poll of nearly 33,000 people and results from focus groups also revealed that many felt they were being left in the dark or were “overwhelmingly bored” by the process. It has also seen an increase in the proportion of the public feeling pessimistic about the future – with very few believing that Brexit will address the frustrations and inequalities that lay behind the vote to leave the EU in 2016.

More people also believe that Brexit is feeding prejudice and division and taking the UK “backwards”, up from 57% in July 2018 to 62% last month. Just 20% of people said they could trust the government to deliver a “good Brexit”. Almost as many Leavers (66%) as Remainers (75%) said they do not trust the government to deliver a Brexit that works for them.

None of the options being considered by parliament have consensus support across the UK, according to the report, and 42% of people think that it would be sensible to delay leaving the EU by a few months so we can agree a better deal with the EU or hold a Final Say vote.

Perhaps that is the topic that should have been discussed yesterday in the House of Commons. But the MPS far preferred to regurgitate long discredited useless stalemate ‘moves’. That’s how much they all care for their own voters. They go from one election to the next, and why would they care about the time in between, what could possibly happen to them?

Well, for one thing, pitchforks could happen. Which methinks is a clean poetic link to another European country that finds itself in deep crisis and distress but refuses to recognize it. France.

 

The interwebs are full of video’s and photos of police brutality perpetrated during the by now 11 Saturdays the Yellow Vests have protested president Macron and their people’s overall situations. It didn’t start out with all that violence, and sure, part of it may have been in response to protests, but what’s gone on in the last few Saturdays is something else.

And the media once again are silent, or mostly. Macron gets more coverage for telling Venezuela’s Maduro to resign than for his own regime’s cruelty towards its own people. But the French people do watch those videos, social media trump traditional ones in these cases, so there’s something good about them after all.

And the Yellow Vests, though the people don’t like the violence, still very much have their sympathy. Seeing Macron’s police beating them up the way they have will only increase the resolve. People losing their eyes, their hands, hundreds if not thousands with less severe but still serious injuries, it’s all being added to Macron’s tally.

 

French Police Weapons Under Scrutiny After Gilets Jaunes Injuries

The French government is under growing pressure to review police use of explosive weapons against civilians after serious injuries were reported during gilets jaunes street demonstrations, including people alleged to have lost eyes and to have had their hands and feet mutilated.

France’s legal advisory body, the council of state, will on Wednesday examine an urgent request by the French Human Rights League and the CGT trade union to ban police from using a form of rubber-bullet launcher in which ball-shaped projectiles are shot out of specialised handheld launchers. France’s rights ombudsman has long warned they are dangerous and carry “disproportionate risk”.

Lawyers have also petitioned the government to ban so-called “sting-ball” grenades, which contain 25g of TNT high-explosive. France is the only European country where crowd-control police use such powerful grenades, which deliver an explosion of small rubber balls that creates a stinging effect as well as launching an additional load of teargas.

The grenades create a deafening effect that has been likened to the sound of an aircraft taking off. France’s centrist president, Emmanuel Macron, is facing renewed calls to ban such weapons after Jérôme Rodrigues, a high-profile member of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) demonstrators was hit in the eye on Saturday in Paris. He is said by his lawyer to have been disabled for life.

Rights groups say Rodrigues’s case is the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers estimate that as many as 17 people have lost an eye because of the police’s use of such weapons since the start of the street demonstrations, while at least three have lost their hands and others have been left with their face or limbs mutilated. Injuries have happened at demonstrations in Paris and other cities, including Bordeaux and Nantes.

The whole thing is utterly insane, but the craziest thing may well be the European Court of Human Rights rejecting a temporary ban on flash-balls last month. Go ahead, Emmanuel, we won’t tell a soul! Flash-balls being an improved -and ‘home-grown’- form of rubber bullets, which in turn have been ‘improved’ upon.

 

French ‘Flash-Ball’ Row Over Riot-Gun Injuries

Appalling injuries caused by French police riot guns during the yellow-vest protests have triggered anger and calls for the weapon to be banned. The LBD launchers known by protesters as “flash-balls” have left 40 people severely wounded, reports say. France’s human rights chief has called for the weapon’s use to be halted, but the government insists it is deployed only under very strict conditions.

Since the “gilets-jaunes” protests began in November, 3,000 people have been injured or even maimed and thousands more arrested. The LBD40 is described as a non-lethal weapon which in fact replaced the old “flash-ball” in France. But the old name is still widely used. It shoots 40mm (1.6in) rubber or foam pellets at a speed of up to 100m per second and is not meant to break the skin. However, some of the accounts of people hit by flash-balls have been shocking.

Volunteer firefighter Olivier Béziade, 47, was shot in the temple by a riot gun during a protest on 12 January in Bordeaux. Video at the time caught him running from police and then collapsing in the street, his face covered in blood. He was taken to hospital, treated for a brain haemorrhage and left in an artificial coma, from which he emerged on Friday. He was one of five seriously wounded on that day alone.

Many of those wounded have been young. One teenager called Lilian Lepage was hit in the face in Strasbourg on Saturday and suffered a broken jaw. His mother said he had been shopping in the city centre when a policeman fired at him. Two schoolboys were badly wounded by flash-ball pellets in separate protests last month. Campaigners say a dozen people have lost an eye ..

A lawyer for some of the victims, Étienne Noël, said many had been maimed. He said police did not have sufficient training in use of the riot guns and many victims had been hit in the head. Earlier this week police made clear the riot gun would be used only where security forces faced violence or if they had no other means of defence. Only the torso and upper or lower limbs could be targeted.

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez told the French Senate on Thursday that the use of force by police was always proportionate and under very strict and controlled conditions. “If the police hadn’t used these means of defence perhaps some of them would have been lynched,” he said. The European Court of Human Rights rejected a temporary ban on flash-balls last month, in a case brought by several people who said they had been hit by flash-balls.

There is also a grenade version of the flash-ball, named the sting-ball. Throw it into a crowd and everyone around gets hit by rubber balls at high speed.

But of course it’s not the weapons that cause the injuries and deaths, it’s the people deploying them. And the people deploying these people. The instructions to use excessive violence because the government feels threatened by its own citizens. And after that the pitchforks and guillotines, real or not. Yanis Varoufakis was right a few weeks ago, Macron is a spent force.

Only a blind fool would use these things against his own people. Or a dictator with absolute power, but Macron doesn’t have that.. By the way, when is Brussels going to condemn Macron for his use of violence?

And this is all before the European elections, and Merkel’s goodbye that will throw Germany into chaos, and and and. Europe, we never knew ya.

 

 

Feb 152016
 


Dorothea Lange We’ll be in California yet. We’re not going back to Arkansas 1938

Financial bubbles blown on the back of massive amounts of debt, of necessity lead to debt deflation (it’s just entropy, really). Fighting this is futile, and grossly costly to boot. The only sensible thing to do is to guide the process as best you can and try to minimize the damage, especially at the bottom rungs of society, because that’s where the deflation first takes hold, and where it spreads out from.

Attempting to boost inflation, or boost demand, before letting the debt deflation run its course through restructuring and defaults (perhaps even a -partial- jubilee) leads only to -further- distortion, and -further- impoverishes society’s poorer (at some point to a large extent the former middle classes). Whose lower spending, as nary a soul seems to comprehend, is the origin of the deflation to begin with.

All the attempts by central bankers to boost inflation that we’ve seen so far squarely ignore this, and operate on the false assumption that if only prices for financial assets and real estate can be raised even higher -artificially-, deflation can be warded off.

Thing is, deflation starts not at the top, it starts at the bottom. It’s not the banks or the bankers or the well-off who are maxed out and stop spending, but the people in the street.

They are responsible for most of the spending in an economy, and therefore for the velocity with which money moves in a society. And if the velocity of money falls below a critical point, no increase in the other side of the inflation/deflation equation -the money/credit supply- can make up for the difference. There is a point where all of the King’s horses and all of the King’s central bankers can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.

The people in the street are not just maxed out in the sense that they have no money, they have less than no money, since they’re deep in debt. An increasing part of whatever they do still have, and what they make in their ever lower paying jobs, goes toward debt payments. Yeah, that’s the giant sucking sound.

QE and other ‘plans’ like it don’t address this even in the slightest, and are necessarily failures before they even start.

Central bank stimulus measures are all exclusively targeted at the upper rungs, and therefore miss their aim entirely. Or perhaps we should say ‘alleged’ aim, since it takes quite a leap of faith to presume that all the world’s central bankers fail to understand their own field so thoroughly that all they can all come up with is failures.

However, given that they all studied the same faulty economics textbooks, we can’t rule out this possibility. It is certainly strongly suggested -once again- by Steve Keen in Our Dysfunctional Monetary System.

Rather than effective remedies, we’ve had inane policies like QE, which purport to solve the crisis by inflating asset prices when inflated asset prices were one of the symptoms of the bubble that caused the crisis. We’ve seen Central Banks pump up private bank reserves in the belief that this will encourage more bank lending when (a) there’s too much bank debt already and (b) banks physically can’t lend out reserves.

What may also play a role is that the upper rungs tend to be blind to anything outside of their own circles, that because they 1) have their hands on a nation’s wallets and 2) they see themselves as the most important segment of any given society, they elect to try and solve the problem inside their own circles -and truly believe this is feasible-.

This can of course not possibly work. Because they’re hugely outnumbered. They don’t have nearly enough influence on money flows in their societies. If they can’t sell the bottom, let’s take a number, 80%, of society sufficient produce or gasoline or homes or trinkets, the entire society seizes up the way an engine does that runs out of oil.

The top makes its fortune for a while getting the bottom ever deeper into debt, only to inevitably find that this kills off the entire economy. Then they do some more of the same, and find ever more of their own kind becoming part of the bottom.

The problem for the rich is simple: there’s not enough of them. Well, that and they don’t understand how societies function. Let alone economies. Scraps off the table won’t do the trick. Next stop pitchforks.

Any deflationary period would have been hard no matter what. Still, none would have had to lead to what we’re facing now.

But look out there at what’s happening in politics, at who’s popular in various places. It’s all geared towards more inequality, not less, like some tooth and claw Darwin version were the world’s economics teacher, wherever you look it’s all the well-off making ever surer they will remain well-off or better.

And even if you look for instance at Bernie Sanders in the US, he wants more for the bottom of society, but that seems more for sentimental or ideological reasons than a sign he actually understands why it would raise the odds of the States being a going concern going forward.

The actual Darwin could have taught us all a lesson or two three about the role of balances in ecosystems, and in human societies. But then he actually studied them. Economists, politicians and central bankers have not.

Feb 102015
 
 February 10, 2015  Posted by at 10:58 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  3 Responses »


Arthur Rothstein Scene along Bathgate Avenue in the Bronx Dec 1936

Global Financial System Stands On The Brink Of Second Credit Crisis (Telegraph)
Chinese Inflation Falls To 0.8% Amid Fears Of Deflationary Spiral (Guardian)
Greek Revolt Over Austerity Is Long Overdue (CNBC)
If Germany Holds Firm On EU Deal, Greece Can Look To US, Russia, China (RT)
US Defends Unruly Greece As Europe Steps Up ‘Grexit’ Threats (AEP)
The ECB Should Stay Out of Politics (Bloomberg)
Tsipras’ Strategy Gives Greeks A Voice (Deutsche Welle)
Greece Needs To Play By The Rules: France (CNBC)
Greece Is Playing To Lose The Debt Crisis Poker Game (Anatole Kaletsky)
‘Peasants With Pitchforks’ Seen If Profits Get Any Fatter (Bloomberg)
How Japan Borrows $9 Trillion Practically for Free (Bloomberg)
Citi: Oil Could Plunge to $20, and This Might Be ‘the End of OPEC’ (Bloomberg)
North Sea Oil Bankruptcy Risk Surges Amid Calls For Tax Cuts (Telegraph)
American Oil Jobs Start Drying Up (Bloomberg)
Brazil’s Rousseff Pours Gas on Petrobras Fire (Bloomberg)
Speculation Against Denmark’s Euro Peg Proving Relentless (Bloomberg)
Masters of Parallel Universes (Dmitry Orlov)
All Twerked Out (Jim Kunstler)
Europe Slaughters Sea Life In The Name Of ‘Science’ (Monbiot)
China Nears Launch Of Hack-proof ‘Quantum Communications’ Link (Caixin)
Heart Of Earth’s Inner Core Revealed (BBC)

“The second global credit crisis is now already unfolding in China..”

Global Financial System Stands On The Brink Of Second Credit Crisis (Telegraph)

The world economy stands on the brink of a second credit crisis as the vital transmission systems for lending between banks begin to seize up and the debt markets fall over. The latest round of quantitative easing from the European Central Bank will buy some time but it looks like too little too late. It was the collapse of US house prices back in 2007 that resulted in the seizure of the credit markets and banking crisis of 2008. And it would be easy to lay the blame for the 2008 financial crisis at the doorstep of American home owners, easy but wrong. The collapse of the US housing market was not the cause of the crisis, it was merely a symptom of the more insidious ills of cheap credit, low risk and the promise of another bailout round the corner.

The Keynesian pump priming that has taken place on a colossal scale across the world is failing. The Chinese economy was growing at 12pc in 2010, but that slowed to 7.7pc in 2013 and 7.4pc last year — its weakest in 24 years. Economists expect Chinese growth to slow to 7pc this year. It is the once booming property sector that has turned into a bust, and is now dragging down the wider economy as the bubble deflates. The second global credit crisis is now already unfolding in China some 6,800 miles away from the epicentre of the first in the US. The bonds of Chinese real estate companies are now falling like dominoes. Kaisa, a Hong Kong-listed developer that raised $2.5bn on international markets had to be bailed out by rival group Sunac last week after it defaulted onits debts. The bonds of other Chinese real estate groups such as Glorious Property and Fantasia have also sold off heavily as the contagion spreads.

Chinese authorities have responded to try and contain the situation. The People’s Bank of China introduced a surprise 50-point cut in the Reserve Requirement Ratio (RRR) from 20pc to 19.5pc. But this misses the point, the credit system in China is completely unsustainable unless new money is printed every year to refinance the old, simply tinkering to ease liquidity won’t cut it. The strain in its banking system is highlighted by the elevated levels of the Shanghai Interbank Offered Rate (SHIBOR), which shows Chinese banks are worried about lending to each other. There is no schadenfreude in watching China unravel. The idea that this is an isolated incident is laughable, remember the very same was said of US subprime. The problem is that banks such as Standard Chartered and HSBC have both rapidly increased their lending operations in Asia since 2008.

Read more …

Prices rise 0.8%, but the economy grows at 7.4%?

Chinese Inflation Falls To 0.8%, Fuelling Fears Of Deflationary Spiral (Guardian)

Chinese inflation plunged to 0.8% in January, its lowest level for more than five years, official data showed on Tuesday, fuelling fears the world’s second-largest economy is on the brink of a deflationary spiral. The rise in the consumer price index (CPI) was sharply down from the 1.5% recorded in December, and was lower than the 1% expected by economists. It was also the weakest number since 0.6% in November 2009. Moderate inflation can be a boon to consumption as it encourages consumers to buy before prices go up, while falling prices encourage shoppers to delay purchases and companies to put off investment, both of which can hurt growth. Slowing demand, a property downturn and falling commodity prices – especially oil – have all driven prices lower and point towards persistent weakness in the world’s second largest economy.

Warmer than average weather in January also caused vegetable, fruit and fish prices to fall, the NBS said. Analysts warned of deflation in the Chinese economy, a key driver of global growth, and called for more economy-boosting measures by Beijing. A collapse in global oil prices have already unleashed a wave of monetary easing around the world as central bankers from Europe to Canada to Australia sought to defuse the deflationary pressures and bolster their economies. “The weak inflation profile suggests that the deflation has become a real risk for China, thus paving way for further monetary policy easing,” ANZ economists Liu Ligang and Zhou Hao said.

Liu Dongliang at China Merchants Bank noted that consumption may have started to feel the pain of China’s growth slowdown, as services and consumer goods prices slumped last month.“We should get vigilant about this sign and pay high attention to changes in the job market,” he said in a research note. Falling inflation is likely to keep downward pressure on the price of other commodities such as iron ore, Australia’s biggest export earner, which has fallen 50% in the past 12 months. However, the prospect of more stimulus measures in China pushed the Australian dollar higher to US78.4c. Analysts also said that factory deflation was a big concern. The data showed producer price index dropped 4.3% in January from a year earlier, worse than a 3.8% fall expected by analysts and extending factory deflation to nearly three years. Price cuts have sapped profitability of Chinese manufacturers.

Read more …

Amen.

Greek Revolt Over Austerity Is Long Overdue (CNBC)

Germany has been sacking Greece and other Mediterranean economies for years, and the Hellenic revolt against austerity is overdue. When the euro was established in 1999, prices were translated from the mark, franc and other currencies into euro at prevailing exchange rates. (Greece joined the euro zone in 2001, giving up the drachma.) National prices reflected differences in labor costs and efficiency across countries, but owing to a variety of social and demographic conditions, productivity improved more rapidly in Germany and other northern countries. Making goods in the South became too expensive, and Greece and others could no longer export enough to pay for imports. Without a single currency, the values of the drachma and other Mediterranean currencies would have fallen against the German mark to restore competitive balance.

Europe has few of the mechanisms that facilitate adjustment in the United States, which has a single currency across a similarly wide range of competitive circumstances. A single language permits workers to go where the jobs are, whereas most Greeks and Italians are stuck where they are born. New Yorkers’ taxes subsidize public works, health care and the like in Mississippi through the federal government in ways the European Commission cannot accomplish. Germany uses its size and influence to resist changes in EU institutions that could alter fiscal arrangements. Hence, the Greeks and other southern Europeans were forced to borrow heavily from private lenders in the north—mostly through their commercial banks—to provide public services, health care and similar services that were hardly overly generous when measured by German standards.

All this kept German factories humming and German unemployment low. When the financial crisis and meltdown of global banking made private borrowing no longer viable, Greece and other southern states were forced to seek loans directly from Germany and other northern governments. Bailouts implemented by Germany through the ECB, the IMF and the European Commission required labor market reforms, cuts in wages and pensions, higher taxes, and less government spending. All to restore Greek competitiveness, growth and solvency—and all have absolutely failed. Starved for investment, the Greek industry is now even less capable of exporting to pay for the imports of everyday items Greeks need. GDP is down 25%, unemployment is about 25%, and health care spending is down 40%. When austerity began, Greece’s sovereign debt was 110% of its GDP. Now it is 160%, grows larger by the day and can never be repaid.

Read more …

“..if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source..”

If Germany Holds Firm On EU Deal, Greece Can Look To US, Russia, China (RT)

Greece warns that if informal EU leader Germany remains rigid on granting Athens a new deal, it will seek assistance elsewhere. The US, Russia and China are the possible candidates. The warning came from new Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, who assumed office after the populist Syriza party won a general election in January and its leader Alexis Tsipras took over as prime minister from Antonis Samaras. “What we want is a deal. But if there is no deal – hopefully (there will be) – and if we see that Germany remains rigid and wants to blow apart Europe, then we have the obligation to go to Plan B. Plan B is to get funding from another source,” Kammenos told Greek television on an overnight show running into early Tuesday, as reported by Reuters. “It could be the United States at best, it could be Russia, it could be China or other countries,” he said.

Syriza gained a plurality of votes thanks to its EU-skeptic platform and a promise to oppose austerity measures imposed on the ailing Mediterranean nation by the “Troika” of foreign creditors in exchange for a debt bailout. Kammenos is not a member of Syriza, but comes from the Independent Greeks, an ally in the coalition government. In the program he said his party and Syriza had converging views on “80% of issues” and that the way of dealing with the debt is among those they agree on. The new Greek cabinet wants part of the national debt written off, a demand that Germany has rejected. Athens also opposes some of Brussels’ policies, most notably the anti-Russian sanctions over the Ukrainian crisis, which led to a painful trade war between Russia and Europe. In the wake of Syriza’s victory, Moscow indicated that it may consider offering a loan to Greece.

Read more …

“..Mr Tsipras vowed to implement the party’s radical Thessaloniki Programme in its “entirety”, including a demand for €11bn of war reparations from Germany, a move deemed deeply offensive in Berlin.”

US Defends Unruly Greece As Europe Steps Up ‘Grexit’ Threats (AEP)

Europe’s creditor powers have reacted with fury as Greece presses ahead with plans to smash its EU-IMF Troika programme and demand war reparations for Nazi occupation, raising the risk of a traumatic rupture with Athens by the end of the month. Wolfgang Schauble, Germany’s finance minister, said there could be no bridging agreement for the radical Syriza government, insisting that it must stick rigidly to the terms of Greece’s €245bn bail-out package and secure a negotiated extension, or face the consequences. “If they want to deal with us, they need a programme,” he said. He issued a clear warning to the new Greek premier Alexis Tsipras that his country will be left penniless in a hostile world. “I don’t know how financial markets will handle it, but maybe he knows better,” he said.

Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission’s chief, urged Syriza not to trifle with the EU or to overplay its hand after winning a landslide mandate last month to end austerity. “Greece shouldn’t assume that the overall mood in Europe has changed,” he said. The EU authorities have told Mr Tsipras that a series of crucial meetings in Brussels this week are his last chance to retreat from hot campaign rhetoric and agree to an extension of the Troika bail-out. The clear threat is that the European Central Bank will cut off €60bn of emergency liquidity support for the Greek financial system when the existing Troika arrangement expires on February 28. This would force Greece to impose capital controls, nationalize the banks, and reintroduce the drachma within days.

Even if the ECB agrees to a stay of execution, Athens will start to run out of money in March, when it faces repayments to the IMF, followed by other creditors. Tax revenues have dried up over recent weeks as Greeks wait to see what Syriza does in office. The treasury’s cash reserves have fallen to €1.5bn. Fears of an imminent collision set off fresh alarm in Greek markets on Monday. The yield on three-year Greek bonds jumped over 300 basis points to 21pc, while bank stocks fell 9pc. Greek lenders are under serious stress. The ECB’s shock decision last week to stop letting them use Greek bonds and Greek-guaranteed debt as collateral for loans has forced them to take on emergency liquidity that is more costly. It also imposes greater “haircuts”, effectively contracting of credit.

This comes at a time when non-performing loans are already the highest in the world at over 40pc and still rising. Greek property prices fell a further 5pc in the fourth quarter of 2014, pushing large numbers of mortgage holders yet deeper into negative equity. Data released today showed that Greece’s industrial output fell 3.8pc in December. Europe’s leaders were stunned by the aggressive tone of Mr Tsipras’s address to the Greek parliament on Sunday night. They had assumed that Syriza would hold out an olive branch once it was safely in office, shifting its stance in time-honoured EU fashion. Instead Mr Tsipras vowed to implement the party’s radical Thessaloniki Programme in its “entirety”, including a demand for €11bn of war reparations from Germany, a move deemed deeply offensive in Berlin.

Read more …

“..the ECB largely makes up its own rules about what to accept as collateral. If it wanted to, it could continue to accept Greek bonds as collateral after the bailout program ends. There was certainly no need to announce that, even before the program ends, Greek bonds would no longer qualify.”

The ECB Should Stay Out of Politics (Bloomberg)

Has the European Central Bank made itself the judge of which countries remain members of the euro area? That would be an amazing assertion of power — on the face of it, completely at odds with its usual insistence that it stands outside politics. Yet that is more or less what the ECB seemed to do with its pronouncements on Greek debt last week. Greece’s new government has promised voters not to renew the European Union’s bailout program, due to expire at the end of this month. It wants new terms, and a financial breathing-space while they’re negotiated. Last week the ECB said that since it can no longer assume a program will be in place, it would stop accepting Greek government bonds and government-guaranteed debt as collateral for lending to Greek banks. After February 11th, it would no longer act as a lender of last resort for Greece.

If that was all there was to it, the ECB announcement would have been tantamount to expelling Greece from the euro system. Greeks have been pulling money out of their banks in recent weeks and months. If a full-scale run developed, and the banks could no longer call on the ECB for liquidity, Greece would need to close its banks and, in short order, begin issuing its own currency. No more monetary union. As you might expect, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For now, the ECB said, Greek banks could continue to access “emergency liquidity assistance” from the Bank of Greece, its local subsidiary. At some point, a supermajority of the ECB’s governing council could vote to suspend that privilege as well. Until that happens, Greece still has a lender of last resort – albeit a quasi-national one, which heightens doubts about the long-term integrity of the euro system.

So what on earth did the ECB hope to achieve with its announcement last week? The ECB said the move was “in line with existing euro system rules.” No doubt that’s true: The ECB hasn’t broken any rules. But the implication that the rules obliged it to act as it did is also wrong. It didn’t need to say anything. That’s why the announcement surprised the markets. Note, too, that the governing council was split on the decision. When it comes to liquidity assistance, the ECB largely makes up its own rules about what to accept as collateral. If it wanted to, it could continue to accept Greek bonds as collateral after the bailout program ends. There was certainly no need to announce that, even before the program ends, Greek bonds would no longer qualify.

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“..Tsipras’ insistence on sticking to his pre-election promises is playing very well at home..”

Tsipras’ Strategy Gives Greeks A Voice (Deutsche Welle)

Vaso Vouvani, a quiet and determined middle-aged mother, had long wanted a leader who stood up for the interests of Greeks, “not bankers, Eurocrats or German politicians.” “We need fighters, not servants of the troika,” she said, referring to the international lenders who had given Greece billions in bailout loans in exchange for punishing austerity measures that deflated the Greek economy. “We have lost our money and our dignity these last five years. We can’t let leaders in Brussels and Berlin continue to hit us with austerity. It’s not working!” During the crisis, Vouvani lost her business, and she hasn’t worked in four years. So she’s been relieved and heartened to see 40-year-old Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, whose leftist, anti-austerity party Syriza came to power two weeks ago, stand up to everyone from eurozone finance chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem to Greek oligarchs evading taxes.

“I hope he fights them all,” she said. “I will be really disappointed if he backs down. I don’t want to see another Greek politician lower his head to people who treat us like we’re nothing.” In his first address to parliament, Tsipras said exactly what she wanted to hear. He promised to end austerity measures, help impoverished Greeks get sustenance and electricity, reform a corrupt political system, go after big-money tax evaders, even sell the taxpayer-funded luxury cars used by cabinet members and parliamentary deputies. “Our government wants to be the voice of the people, to express the people’s will,” he declared in a long, emotional speech that earned him a standing ovation.

Nick Malkoutzis, editor of the Athens-based economic and political analysis website macropolis.gr, told DW that Tsipras’ insistence on sticking to his pre-election promises is playing very well at home. “This is driven by his belief that, unlike previous governments, this Syriza-led administration should live up to as many of the election pledges that it can,” said Malkoutzis. “And unlike previous leaders, that he shouldn’t cave in at the first sign of pressure from Greece’s lenders.” That pressure has already come. The European Central Bank, for instance, has cut off credit to Greek banks. And the leaders of Germany, which has provided most of the bailout loans to Greece, have refused to back debt relief or any renegotiation of its debt deal.

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The Greeks voted out a government because it made certain deals, but the new government is still bound by the same deals. Certainly that’s not 100% democratic.

Greece Needs To Play By The Rules: France (CNBC)

Both sides in the increasingly heated debate over the future of Greece in the euro zone have to respect the each other’s views to reach an agreement, French finance minister Michel Sapin has told CNBC. “There is another way, as long as we respect two principles,” he told CNBC Tuesday on the sidelines of the G-20 finance meeting in Istanbul. “First: we have to respect the Greek vote. A new government was chosen. It is not possible to ask this government to do exactly the same thing we asked from the previous government. Second: Greeks need to know that rules exist in Europe, in the relationship with the IMF, with the ECB, with the European Union. We all have to respect each other and there will be room for an agreement.”

However, Sapin warned, Greece will have to abide to the conditions of the €240 billion bailout agreement. “Greeks can’t behave as if they arrived in a game where there was no rule. In Europe, there are rules. Greeks have always been part of the IMF; Greeks have been part of the EU almost from the beginning. Greeks say themselves that the ECB is their central bank. So it is in that framework that they have to work.” Time is rapidly running out for Greece. The “troika” of organizations overseeing the country’s loans —the ECB, IMF and EC – have said Greece will not receive a final tranche of aid if it does not comply with the conditions of its bailout program, which is due to end at the end of February.

In addition, the government has asked the ECB for a bridging loan, which the bank has refused. As global markets show no signs of calming over the future of the bailout program, all eyes are on the Greek government’s “Plan C” to find a compromise with lenders. On Wednesday, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is expected to meet his euro zone counterparts in Brussels – the eurogroup of finance ministers – to discuss a new set of reform proposals. As well as what has been called “10 surprise reforms” to replace some current austerity measures that the government does not like, Varoufakis is expected to ask for a “bridge program” to cover the government’s funding needs while a new debt pact is agreed, Greek newspaper Protothema reported Monday.

Despite repeated insistence from the euro zone that Greece must continue with austerity measures, miniters in the anti-austerity government led by Syriza told CNBC they are confident a solution can be found Wednesday. “We think we’ve made a very reasonable set of proposals about what we could take from the old program and what we add to the new program,” Euclid Tsakalotos, alternate minister for International Economic Relations for Syriza, told CNBC Monday. “What we’re saying is, yes, there can be a compromise, yes, we have a mandate (to govern) and yes, there are 18 other mandates in the euro zone so we accept that but to listen to our mandate needs time and we think we have been reasonable asking for that time.”

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Kaletsky thinks he’s mighty smart.

Greece Is Playing To Lose The Debt Crisis Poker Game (Anatole Kaletsky)

Greece’s idealistic new leaders seem to believe that they can overpower bureaucratic opposition without the usual compromises and obfuscations, simply by brandishing their democratic mandate. But the primacy of bureaucracy over democracy is a core principle that EU institutions will never compromise. The upshot is that Greece is back where it started in the poker contest with Germany and Europe. The new government has shown its best cards too early and has no credibility left if it wants to try bluffing. So what will happen next? The most likely outcome is that Syriza will soon admit defeat, like every other eurozone government supposedly elected on a reform mandate, and revert to a troika-style programme, sweetened only by dropping the name “troika”.

Another possibility, while Greek banks are still open for business, might be for the government to unilaterally implement some of its radical plans on wages and public spending, defying protests from Brussels, Frankfurt, and Berlin. If Greece tries such unilateral defiance, the ECB will almost certainly vote to stop its emergency funding to the Greek banking system after the troika programme expires on 28 February. As this self-inflicted deadline approaches, the Greek government will probably back down, just as Ireland and Cyprus capitulated when faced with similar threats.

Such last-minute capitulation could mean resignation for the new Greek government and its replacement by EU-approved technocrats, as in the constitutional putsch against Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi in 2012. In a less extreme scenario, Varoufakis might be replaced as finance minister, while the rest of the government survives. The only other possibility, if and when Greek banks start collapsing, would be an exit from the euro. Whatever form the surrender takes, Greece will not be the only loser. Proponents of democracy and economic expansion have missed their best chance to outmanoeuvre Germany and end the self-destructive austerity that Germany has imposed on Europe.

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“Fear breeds bargains. You cannot have a bargain in the absence of fear.”

‘Peasants With Pitchforks’ Seen If Profits Get Any Fatter (Bloomberg)

Rob Arnott, chief executive and co-founder of Research Affiliates LLC, recently picked up the phone to share some thoughts on the current state of the stock market. Arnott is a pioneer of investing strategies that could be considered “unconventional” if they weren’t slowly but surely becoming more conventional. Among them is the idea of “fundamental indexing,” or weighting stock portfolios by economic metrics like sales, dividends and cash flows rather than the market value of the companies. (The term “smart beta” came later.) As such, fundamental indexes tend to lean toward value stocks instead of growth stocks. How are they doing? Well, the FTSE RAFI U.S. 1000 Total Return Index returned 140% in the 10 years through 2014 compared with 114% for the Russell 1000 Index, even though growth far outperformed value in the same decade. Anyway, when talking to a person like this, sometimes it’s best for a reporter to just shut the heck up, save the bad jokes for the next happy hour, and let the smarter person do all the talking. So here goes.

Q: Does it seem like the market will move back to a value orientation?
A: “I think the market’s stretched both in terms of valuation levels and the spread between growth and value. It doesn’t feel like the tech bubble to me, it feels a little bit more like ’98 or early ’99 in terms of the magnitude by which things are stretched. But you do have some relatively extreme examples, companies that are trading at large multiples to revenue, let alone multiples of earnings or cash flow. And that hearkens back to the ’98-’99 experience. So I think we’re seeing echoes of the bubble in today’s global market behavior.

“There is a flight to safety and the snapback from that, when it comes, will reward the value investor handily. You also see a huge spread between the comfort markets, the United States at a Shiller P/E ratio of 27 times earnings, and the fear markets, emerging markets, where a fundamental index in emerging markets is currently at a Shiller P/E ratio of 10 and a half. My goodness, 60% discount to the S&P 500. That’s startling. Why would it trade at such a vast discount? Because people are afraid. Fear breeds bargains. You cannot have a bargain in the absence of fear.”

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Ideal situation for digging an even deeper debt hole.

How Japan Borrows $9 Trillion Practically for Free (Bloomberg)

Japan’s outstanding national debt is more than 1 quadrillion yen ($8.4 trillion) and more than twice the size of the economy. That’s way more even than Greece, which is fighting with the rest of Europe for some relief over its debt load. Yet Japan has the world’s fourth-lowest borrowing costs, even as its borrowings continue to rise. Weird, right? Here’s why Japan, home to the world’s largest debt burden, can borrow massive amounts of money at little or no cost.

Borrow from domestic investors, mostly banks and consumers Foreign ownership of Japanese government bonds and treasury bills was 8.9% at the end of September, according to central bank data. That compares with 48% of U.S. treasuries held by foreigners, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Have a few giant public entities that invest long-term in your debt At the end of September, the following three public institutions held at least 46% of Japan’s debt. The central bank: The Bank of Japan has bought government bonds since 2001 in an attempt to stimulate the economy and beat deflation, with its holdings doubling since the current monetary easing policy started in April 2013. At the end of September it had 23% of government bonds and treasury bills. And this has continued to rise. The post office: Japan Post Holdings held 167 trillion yen of the government’s debt, about 16% of the total and the most after the central bank. About 70% was at the Japan Post Bank, and the rest was at Japan Post Insurance. The pension system: Public pension funds held 62 trillion yen of the government’s securities, more than 6% of the total. Most of these were at the Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s biggest pension manager. Almost half of its 130.9 trillion yen in assets were in domestic bonds at the end of September, with the GPIF aiming to cut this to 35%.

Have a low rate of inflation and slow growth When growth and inflation are low, this encourages investors to purchases government bonds, which guarantee a risk-free return. Japan’s economy grew an average of 0.8% in the 10 years through 2013 and probably expanded 0.2% last year after a sales tax hike pushed it into recession mid-year. By comparison, the U.S. grew an average 1.6% in the 10 years through 2014. Japan’s consumer prices excluding fresh food rose to 0.5% in December from a year earlier, once you strip out the effect of the sales-tax rise. In the five years through the end of 2014, price were little changed, rising an average 0.04%.

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Citi’s all over the map. Goal seeked.

Citi: Oil Could Plunge to $20, and This Might Be ‘the End of OPEC’ (Bloomberg)

The recent surge in oil prices is just a “head-fake,” and oil as cheap as $20 a barrel may soon be on the way, Citigroup said in a report on Monday as it lowered its forecast for crude. Despite global declines in spending that have driven up oil prices in recent weeks, oil production in the U.S. is still rising, wrote Edward Morse, Citigroup’s global head of commodity research. Brazil and Russia are pumping oil at record levels, and Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran have been fighting to maintain their market share by cutting prices to Asia. The market is oversupplied, and storage tanks are topping out. A pullback in production isn’t likely until the third quarter, Morse said.

In the meantime, West Texas Intermediate Crude, which currently trades at around $52 a barrel, could fall to the $20 range “for a while,” according to the report. The U.S. shale-oil revolution has broken OPEC’s ability to manipulate prices and maximize profits for oil-producing countries. “It looks exceedingly unlikely for OPEC to return to its old way of doing business,” Morse wrote. “While many analysts have seen in past market crises ‘the end of OPEC,’ this time around might well be different,” Morse said. Citi reduced its annual forecast for Brent crude for the second time in 2015. Prices in the $45-$55 range are unsustainable and will trigger “disinvestment from oil” and a fourth-quarter rebound to $75 a barrel, according to the report. Prices this year will likely average $54 a barrel.

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“In the absence of successful consolidation, we expect that as many as 50 companies in the sector face administration in the next eighteen months.”

North Sea Oil Bankruptcy Risk Surges Amid Calls For Tax Cuts (Telegraph)

The number of British oil and gas related companies at risk of going bankrupt has increased by almost three quarters amid a steep decline in the fortunes of the North Sea following a plunge in the price of crude. Data from insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor released exclusively to The Telegraph shows that the number of UK oil and gas businesses experiencing “significant” financial distress increased by 69pc to 486 in the fourth quarter, compared with 288 companies a year earlier. “We expect there to be a major wave of consolidation in the industry as businesses race against time to deliver cost synergies or face falling into greater distress,” said Julie Palmer, partner at Begbies Traynor.

“In the absence of successful consolidation, we expect that as many as 50 companies in the sector face administration in the next eighteen months.” The oil industry is lobbying Chancellor George Osborne hard for tax breaks and financial incentives to boost the North Sea amid fears of cut backs by operators and falling production. Oil prices have bounced recently but remain down around 50pc at just under $60 per barrel when compared with levels achieved in June last year. “Smaller oil and gas companies will be hardest hit by historically low oil prices and major cuts to investment in the industry as they lack the cash reserves the big players have to weather the storm.

In particular, we expect service firms to face rapidly deteriorating trading as oil rigs are taken offline and extraction firms race to reduce their cash burn in an environment where it is increasingly challenging to raise new funds,” said Ms Palmer. Around 16bn barrels of oil are thought to remain in the region, which started being exploited in the early 1970s. But rates of decline have increased in recent years as the cost of production has increased. More than 450,000 jobs in the UK are thought to depend on the industry, which is estimated to be worth £35bn to the British economy.

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“Last month was more than seven times as bad as the next-worst January for energy industry layoffs..”

American Oil Jobs Start Drying Up (Bloomberg)

It’s been a Spindletop-like five years for the American oilman. As fracking projects mounted from the expanse of south Texas to North Dakota’s Drift Prairie, hiring did too. Last year, about 198,000 workers were employed in oil and gas extraction, the most since 1987. Another 325,500 were working in the industry’s support services, the most since the Labor Department began tracking those figures in 1990. Combined, some 523,500 were on company payrolls in 2014, more than twice the number a decade earlier. That’s likely to change this year. A report last week from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas showed 20,193, or 38%, of the 53,041 announced job cuts in January were in the energy industry. Oilfield service company Schlumberger last month said it will eliminate 9,000 jobs; Baker Hughes and Halliburton have said they expect to cut 7,000 and 1,000 positions, respectively.

Not all of those will occur in the U.S., and the Challenger announcements have to be taken with a grain of salt because they include foreign affiliates of American companies. Also, many job cuts are carried out through early retirement and some may not even occur at all. Still, exploration and production customers have so far slashed spending budgets by as much as 30% for this year, Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar said in January, and that doesn’t bode well for the industry’s employment picture. More than 37% of the announcements in January originated from the nation’s No. 1 oil-producing state – Texas. Mine Yucel, head of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said last month that 140,000 Texas jobs directly and indirectly tied to energy will be lost this year if oil stays near $50 a barrel.

North Dakota is conspicuously absent from Challenger’s state breakdown of job-cut announcements, though that too may change. “The economies throughout the northern United States that have been thriving as a result of the oil boom could experience a steep decline in employment across all sectors, including retail, construction, food service and entertainment,” John A. Challenger, the firm’s CEO, said in the report. The January job-cut announcements in the Challenger report are particularly stark when measured against data from the same month going back to 2004. Last month was more than seven times as bad as the next-worst January for energy industry layoffs, in 2009, when companies announced 2,590 job cuts. In 2009, the last year of the recession, oil and gas extraction payrolls declined by 11,800 – and that occurred when crude prices nearly doubled from a January average of around $42.

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She better retire.

Brazil’s Rousseff Pours Gas on Petrobras Fire (Bloomberg)

By making administration loyalist Aldemir Bendine the new head of Brazil’s state-run oil giant Petrobras, President Dilma Rousseff has demonstrated that she’s more interested in protecting her party’s interests than restoring the crown jewel of Brazil’s economy. At the news, investors have dumped Petrobras shares, and you can’t blame them: The company is engulfed in a monumental corruption scandal involving billions in inflated construction contracts, which has implicated scores of executives and politicians. And Bendine, who has been running Banco de Brasil, is closely tied to Rousseff’s Workers’ Party, which has turned Petrobras into a piggy bank for pet programs. Bendine’s reputation is further clouded by an investigation into irregular loans and a large unexplained fine he paid to Brazil’s tax agency in 2012.

Of course, even if Rousseff had named more market-friendly executives to Petrobras’s top management team (after the company’s previous leaders defenestrated last week), they would still be reporting to her, which is enough to make the market nervous. As the chairman of Petrobras from 2003 to 2010, Rousseff either a) did not see, b) chose to ignore or c) took part in the dodgy deals that have caused the company to rack up more than a billion dollars in alleged graft losses and incinerate tens of billions in its market value. Since taking power in 2002, the Workers’ Party has steadily eroded Petrobras’s managerial autonomy, a process that accelerated with the 2007 discovery of enormous oil deposits off the coast of Brazil. At this point, the only thing that can reassure Brazilian investors and restore Petrobras’s luster is a reversal of the most damaging policies the administration has put in place.

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“We can see from the forward rates that the market views the current upward pressure on the krone as the greatest ever.”

Speculation Against Denmark’s Euro Peg Proving Relentless (Bloomberg)

Less than a week after Denmark resorted to its deepest rate cut ever amid historic currency interventions, forward rates suggest some traders and investors still aren’t convinced the central bank can save its euro peg. SEB, the largest Nordic currency trader, says capital flows into AAA-rated Denmark forced the central bank to dump about $4.6 billion in kroner in the first three days of February alone, almost a third the record amount it sold in all of January. Nordea Bank AB, Scandinavia’s biggest lender, says Denmark will need to deliver another 25 basis-point cut to fight back demand for kroner, bringing the benchmark deposit rate to minus 1%.

“The pressure on the krone hasn’t eased yet,” Jens Naervig Pedersen, an economist at Danske Bank, said by phone. “We can see from the forward rates that the market views the current upward pressure on the krone as the greatest ever.” Governor Lars Rohde addressed speculators last week in what he characterized as a verbal intervention to persuade them he won’t let the krone’s peg to the euro collapse. Such a scenario is “unthinkable” and the central bank will do “whatever it takes” to avoid it, he said after delivering a fourth rate cut in less than three weeks. Denmark’s largest institutional investor, ATP, sent a clear message of trust in the peg the same day, revealing it hasn’t bothered to hedge its $110 billion in assets against the possibility that the nation’s currency regime might break.

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“Next: do we make the arbitrary leap of judgment and declare that that’s all the lies we will have ever been told, or do we admit the possibility that this is only the tip of an iceberg of lies, that lying is a modus vivendi for the operatives behind them?”

Masters of Parallel Universes (Dmitry Orlov)

Oddly enough, such quantum effects are quite normal to observe within the political space. Here the physical objects involved are far too large to give rise to the parallel universes of quantum physics, but the narratives they give rise to are not. This is because the narratives are a matter of perception, and there can be historical periods, such as the present one, when the peephole through which the political establishment and the mainstream media allow us to see the world becomes so tiny that it becomes a toss-up as to whether or not any given photon will manage to find its way through it. Here, reality becomes fractured into parallel universes as soon as we make the realization that we are being lied to. Were there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? No, and the vial of white powder which Colin Powell menacingly held up at the UN was fake.

The Iraqi mobile biological weapons factories did not exist. Was Al Qaeda active in Iraq prior to the US invasion? No, we know that it wasn’t. These lies are now known to be factual—uncontested, commonplace knowledge. Next: do we make the arbitrary leap of judgment and declare that that’s all the lies we will have ever been told, or do we admit the possibility that this is only the tip of an iceberg of lies, that lying is a modus vivendi for the operatives behind them? If we do, then, to be conservative, for every official narrative we must construct one or more unofficial but also plausible (and perhaps much more plausible) narratives. Each of them constitutes a parallel universe, and we can’t know which of them we inhabit until some happy accident—a leak, an investigation, a damning bit of physical evidence, or an outright admission of complicity or guilt—collapses the probability waveform, destroying all the parallel universes but the real one.

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“What a shock it would be if Americans began to witness acts of fortitude and valor among us.”

All Twerked Out (Jim Kunstler)

The Romans, on their journey to decadence, lacked the voltage and the wiring to amplify the anomie overtaking them. We’re bathed and bombarded with the images of exactly how disgusting we are. People of WalMart, throw off your chains of debt, indeed! Imagine trying to govern a land of such vicious dolts. Well, here’s a news flash: no one is really trying — whether from a lack of conviction or courage or intelligence, or out of sheer contempt, it is hard to say. It is heartening, finally, to see Europe attempt to creep away from the intrigues of our Klown Konfederacy at least in the current matter of Ukraine, that poor perpetually over-trodden land of potato-eaters lately torn asunder by America’s idiotic wish to wrest it away from Russia’s 1000-year sphere of influence.

Merkel and Hollande stole over to Moscow last week to confab with Mr. Putin. They evidently omitted to inform the haircut-in-search-of-a-brain, Secretary of State John Kerry. Who would want that mule-faced ninny at the table? The Europeans are beginning to say some sane and arresting things, such as: Russia and Europe are part of the same civilization – note the implication that perhaps America is not so much in that club anymore. Perhaps it should be left twerking out on one of its fabulous lost highways until it is all twerked out. Europe, of course, has its own problems and they are very grave, and they are hard to understand because they derive from a financial system grown so abstruse and impenetrable that the ancient black magic arts look like a game of Go Fish in comparison.

At this late stage, they can only pretend to figure out where all the entwined obligations really lead, and what might happen if someone starts to yank on a thread somewhere. The question for the moment therefore is: can they continue to succeed in pretending? A sickening sense of look-out-below spreads through the sentient ranks. This week will be a doozy. One thing is clearing up: Europe does not want or need to start a war with Russia at America’s insistence. What America needs is a war with itself, a war against the lazy narcissism that has left it susceptible to armies of grifters and racketeers, because ordinary people were too busy twerking and jerking to pay any real attention to the systematic dismemberment of their culture. Waiting in the wings is a whole category of human endeavor quaintly known as virtue, lately absent in the collective consciousness. What a shock it would be if Americans began to witness acts of fortitude and valor among us.

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“Eighty-five massive Dutch supertrawlers have now been equipped with electric pulse gear, at a cost of around £300,000 per ship.”

Europe Slaughters Sea Life In The Name Of ‘Science’ (Monbiot)

One of the biggest jokes in conservation is the Japanese government’s claim to be engaged in “scientific whaling”. All the killing by its harpoon fleet takes place under the guise of “research”, as this is the only justification available, under international rules. According to Joji Morishita, a diplomat representing Japan at the whaling negotiations, this “research programme” has produced 666 scientific papers. While we must respect Mr Morishita’s right to invoke the number of the Beast, which may on this occasion be appropriate, during its investigation of Japanese whaling, the International Court of Justice discovered that the entire “research programme” had actually generated just two peer-reviewed papers, which used data from the carcasses of nine whales.

Over the same period, the Japanese fleet killed around 3,600. So what were the pressing scientific questions this killing sought to address? Here are the likely research areas: • How much money can be made from selling each carcass? • Does whale meat taste better fried or roasted? • To what extent can we take the piss and get away with it? We are rightly outraged by such deceptions. But while we focus our anger on a country on the other side of the world, the same trick – the mass slaughter of the creatures of the sea under the guise of “scientific research” – is now being deployed under our noses.

Our own government, alongside the European commission and other member states, is perpetrating this duplicity. Fishing in Europe with poisons, explosives and electricity is banned. But the commission has gradually been rescinding the ban on using electricity. It began with one or two boats, then in 2010, after ferocious lobbying by the government of the Netherlands, 5% of the Dutch trawler fleet was allowed to use this technique. In 2012 the proportion was raised to 10%. Eighty-five massive Dutch supertrawlers have now been equipped with electric pulse gear, at a cost of around £300,000 per ship.

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The NSA is not going to like this.

China Nears Launch Of Hack-proof ‘Quantum Communications’ Link (Caixin)

This may be a quantum-leap year for an initiative that accelerates data transfers close to the speed of light with no hacking threats through so-called “quantum communications” technology. Within months, China plans to open the world’s longest quantum-communications network, a 2,000-kilometer (1,240-mile) electronic highway linking government offices in the cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Meanwhile, the country’s aerospace scientists are preparing a communications satellite for a 2016 launch that would be a first step toward building a quantum communications network in the sky. It’s hoped this and other satellites can be used to overcome technical hurdles, such as distance restrictions, facing land-based systems.

Physicists around the world have spent years working on quantum-communications technology. But if all goes as planned, China would be the first country to put a quantum-communications satellite in orbit, said Wang Jianyu, deputy director of the China Academy of Science’s (CAS) Shanghai branch. At a recent conference on quantum science in Shanghai, Wang said scientists from CAS and other institutions have completed major research and development tasks for launching the satellite equipped with quantum-communications gear. The satellite program’s likelihood for success was confirmed by China’s leading quantum-communications scientist, Pan Jianwei, a CAS academic who is also a professor of quantum physics.

The satellite would be used to transmit encoded data through a method called quantum key distribution (QKD), which relies on cryptographic keys transmitted via light-pulse signals. QKD is said to be nearly impossible to hack, since any attempted eavesdropping would change the quantum states and thus could be quickly detected by data-flow monitors. A satellite-based quantum-communications system could be used to build a secure information bridge between the nation’s capital and Urumqi, a city that’s the capital of the restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in the west, Pan said. It’s likely the technology initially will be used to transmit sensitive diplomatic, government-policy and military information. Future applications could include secure transmissions of personal and financial data.

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Fascinating.

Heart Of Earth’s Inner Core Revealed (BBC)

Scientists say they have gained new insight into what lies at the very centre of the Earth. Research from China and the US suggests that the innermost core of our planet has another, distinct region at its centre. The team believes that the structure of the iron crystals there is different from those found in the outer part of the inner core. The findings are reported in the journal Nature Geoscience. Without being able to drill into the heart of the Earth, its make-up is something of a mystery. So instead, scientists use echoes generated by earthquakes to study the core, by analysing how they change as they travel through the different layers of our planet. Prof Xiaodong Song, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said: “The waves are bouncing back and forth from one side of the Earth to the other side of the Earth.”

Prof Song and his colleagues in China say this data suggests that the Earth’s inner core – a solid region that is about the size of the Moon – is made up of two parts. The seismic wave data suggests that crystals in the “inner inner core” are aligned in an east-to-west direction – flipped on their side, if you are looking down at our planet from high above the North Pole. Those in the “outer inner core” are lined up north to south, so vertical if peering down from the same lofty vantage point. Prof Song said: “The fact we are discovering different structures at different regions of the inner core can tell us something about the very long history of the Earth.” The core, which lies more than 5,000km down, started to solidify about a billion years ago – and it continues to grow about 0.5mm each year.

The finding that it has crystals with a different alignment, suggests that they formed under different conditions and that our planet may have undergone a dramatic change during this period. Commenting on the research, Prof Simon Redfern from the University of Cambridge said: “Probing deeper into the solid inner core is like tracing it back in time, to the beginnings of its formation. “People have noticed differences in the way seismic waves travel through the outer parts of the inner core and its innermost reaches before, but never before have they suggested that the alignment of crystalline iron that makes up this region is completely askew compared to the outermost parts. “If this is true, it would imply that something very substantial happened to flip the orientation of the core to turn the alignment of crystals in the inner core north-south as is seen today in its outer parts.”

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