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Debt Rattle December 7 2023

Dec 072023
 
 December 7, 2023  Posted by at 9:30 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , ,  59 Responses »


Vincent van Gogh Self-Portrait with Straw Hat Aug-Sep 1887

 

• Amid Fear of Trump ‘Dictatorship’, Some See Assassination (Robert Bridge)
• The ‘Jan. 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump (Julie Kelly)
• Israel Headed for Strategic Defeat in Gaza (Scott Ritter)
• Erdogan Sees Netanyahu Balancing On Brink Of Collapse (TASS)
• Putin Visits to UAE, Saudi Arabia Prompted by Global Dynamics of Gaza War (Sp.)
• Russia Will Attack NATO – Biden (RT)
• US Is Withholding Aid To Push Ukraine Towards Negotiations With Russia (MoA)
• Is Ukraine Aid ‘Dead’? (Sp.)
• Yellen Says Ukraine’s Defeat Would Be Fault of the US (Sp.)
• US Aid To Ukraine Laundered Back To Military-Industrial Complex – Massie (RT)
• Ukraine Won’t Get Operational Pause in Winter – Scott Ritter (Sp.)
• Ramaswamy in GOP Presidential Debate Says Ukraine Conflict ‘Pointless’ (Sp.)
• Hunter Biden Threatened With Contempt Of Congress If He Bails On Testimony
• US State Dept Sued For Conspiring To Censor American Media Companies (ZH)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDER THE CLOUDS OF WAR, IT IS HUMANITY HANGING ON THE CROSS OF IRON

 

 

Nap/Ritter

 

 

 

 

Ireland

 

 

Escobar

 

 

 

 

First thing they did was try to undo everything Trump did.

“..by the end of his ninth day at the White House, Biden had signed 40 executive orders, actions, and presidential memorandum – an all-time record..”

• Amid Fear of Trump ‘Dictatorship’, Some See Assassination (Robert Bridge)

As polls show Donald Trump has taken a broad lead over U.S. President Joe Biden in five battleground states, the Liberal media has shifted into full-panic mode, while making some not-so-subtle calls for the Orange Man’s ‘elimination.’ Whether real or imagined, Washington, D.C. appears to be heading for its own ‘Caesarian moment’ as the mainstream media is talking up the prospects of a dictatorship descending upon the fair land should a Trump restoration come to pass. “Are you afraid of a Donald Trump dictatorship,” asked Greg Sargent in an opinion piece in The Washington Post. “Well, know this: The only thing you have to fear is fear of Tyrannus Trumpus itself.”

Brace yourself, dear reader, for the remainder of the hit piece is littered with no less preposterous forms of government rule to describe Donald Trump, without ever providing an iota of proof to support the claims: “authoritarian rule,” “full-blown autocracy,” Trumpian tyranny,” “dictatorial intentions,” “despotism,” “threat to democracy,” “antidemocratic menace,” violent coup.” and “autocratic threat.” It’s just a little ironic that for all the Liberal handwringing over the possibility of The Donald seizing “autocratic powers” come November, there was no such consternation when Joe Biden behaved worse than any Caligula just hours after being elected in 2020.

The septuagenarian leader, alone at his desk and donning a black mask, signed off on dozens of executive orders that served as a death sentence for: a viable U.S.-Mexico border wall; the $9 billion, 1,200-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada that would have made America energy independent; biological males from using the female bathrooms and changing rooms, and a raft of other issues that were resolved without an ounce of congressional debate. Incredibly, by the end of his ninth day at the White House, Biden had signed 40 executive orders, actions, and presidential memorandum – an all-time record. Despite all of this, Biden is now acting like he is the Maginot Line against the possibility of all-out tyranny/ authoritarianism/ dictatorship/ autocracy, take your pick.

“If Trump wasn’t running, I’m not sure I’d be running. But we cannot let him win,” the 81-year-old Democrat told a fundraiser event in Massachusetts. In a cloud of self-righteousness and grand delusion, the Liberals sincerely believe that Trump is about to enjoy, in the words of Robert Kagan, the premier neocon who co-wrote the infamous tract Project for a New American Century, “a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.” Unfortunately, Kagan didn’t think to apply the brakes there, but went on to provide an apocalyptic-sounding fender-bender that many people took as the latest call to ‘take out’ Trump, the upcoming “president for life.”

“Are we going to do anything about it? To shift metaphors, if we thought there was a 50 percent chance of an asteroid crashing into North America a year from now, would we be content to hope that it wouldn’t? Or would we be taking every conceivable measure to try to stop it, including many things that might not work but that, given the magnitude of the crisis, must be tried anyway?” [..] Maybe Trump, should he be re-elected, will focus his attention on media harassment. In the meantime, however, he seems to be having fun trolling his opponents. Trump mocked questions about ‘dictatorial rule’ this week, saying he would be a dictator only on “day one,” and then he’s going to shut down the border and get to drilling for oil. “After that, I’m not a dictator, OK?” It’s tempting to ask how the ancient Romans would have responded to such a deal.

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“..Washington “is the worst possible place for any Jan. 6 defendant, but especially Donald Trump, to have a trial.”

• The ‘Jan. 6 Jurisprudence’ About to Be Unleashed on Trump (Julie Kelly)

Defense attorneys have coined the term “January 6 Jurisprudence” to describe the treatment received by the more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. This carve-out legal system involves the unprecedented and possibly unlawful use of a corporate evidence-tampering statute; excessive prison sentences and indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration; and the designation of nonviolent offenses as federal crimes of terrorism. A universal feature is the requirement that a Jan. 6 defendant, usually a supporter of Donald Trump, face trial in Washington, D.C., a city overwhelmingly populated by Democrats. Federal judges have denied every change of venue motion filed in Jan. 6 cases, arguing those who protested at the Capitol can get a fair trial in the nation’s capital. The results so far appear to contradict the court’s collective conclusion.

Court records show the jury selection process has repeatedly revealed a strong degree of bias against anyone tied to Jan. 6. At least 130 defendants have been convicted at trial – not one has been acquitted by a jury – and hundreds have been sentenced to prison time ranging from seven days to 22 years. Defense lawyers say this track record helps explain why the vast majority of defendants have opted for a plea deal rather than go to trial. This is the same environment that now awaits the former president as he prepares to stand trial in Washington on March 4, 2024 for election interference, in addition to an array of criminal and civil cases against him elsewhere. While Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team and Trump’s counsel spar over a number of issues, perhaps the biggest dispute will concern whether it will be possible to seat an impartial jury for the presumptive 2024 GOP nominee in a city that voted 92% for Joe Biden in 2020.

After Smith indicted Trump in August, a Jan. 6 defense attorney who is not representing the former president, J. Daniel Hull, told the New York Times that Washington “is the worst possible place for any Jan. 6 defendant, but especially Donald Trump, to have a trial.” U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan recently set a jury selection schedule for Smith’s four-count indictment against Trump for the events of Jan. 6. She ordered both parties to begin developing a questionnaire, due Jan. 9, 2024, that hundreds of D.C. residents will be asked to complete so the court can begin the initial step of weeding out unqualified jurors. Stakes are high for both sides. Trump’s lawyers must navigate constraints on how many jurors can be stricken from consideration to ensure their client gets a fair trial. The Department of Justice must convince the American people that a case brought by a Democratic administration and handled by a Democratic-appointed judge with a record of inflammatory statements about the former president will be heard by unbiased jurors.

The Sixth Amendment guarantees, among other rights, “the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” In extreme cases, criminal defendants can petition to move their trial out of the prosecuting jurisdiction for a number of reasons, not the least of which is sustained, negative press coverage that taints the jury pool. Trump’s lawyers are not discussing their strategy publicly, but sources have indicated to RealClearInvestigations that the defense will file a change of venue motion in the next month or two. Given the partisan composition of Washington, saturation coverage of the former president’s ongoing legal woes, and the city’s relatively small population, Trump will have a strong argument in favor of moving the trial outside of the nation’s capital. Yet a review of Jan. 6 cases to date suggests the odds are against that. Not a single judge on the D.C. District Court has granted a change of venue motion even for high-profile trials such as those for members of the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, the so-called “militia” groups involved in the Capitol protest

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“War, the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously noted, is politics by other means. Hamas has proven the maxim to its fullest extent, accomplishing politically that which could only be initiated by Israel’s criminal use of force against the Palestinian people.”

• Israel Headed for Strategic Defeat in Gaza (Scott Ritter)

The attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 against Israeli military positions and settlements which, collectively, formed what is known as the “Gaza barrier system”, triggered a massive Israeli military response. There are two aspects of this cause-and-effect relationship that stand out. First, and perhaps most importantly, it was the goal and objective of Hamas to have Israel respond impulsively. Hamas did not have to think out of the box, so to speak, to imagine such a reaction—since 2006, it has been established and well-known Israeli policy to conduct military campaign based upon the premise of collective punishment of a civilian population. Moreover, given the Israeli predilection for revenge that dates to the massacre of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich summer Olympics, a massive military incursion into Gaza to hold to account those responsible for the October 7 attacks was likewise as predictable as snow falling in Siberia in the wintertime.

Second, and less predictable than the first, was the poor performance of the Israeli security establishment, including the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and Israeli intelligence. Not only did the Israeli security forces fail to act on what appears to have been ample evidence pointing to a Hamas attack along the lines of that executed on October 7, but once the Hamas attack began, the failure of the IDF to defend against the attack, and the plodding, indiscriminate nature of the Israeli counterattack, which appears to have inflicted significant casualties on Israeli civilians that the Israeli authorities have attributed to the Hamas attackers, seriously eroded the notion of the invincibility and infallibility of the Israeli military and security establishment. But this was only the beginning of what would amount to a strategic Israeli defeat at the hands of Hamas. The Israelis proceeded to mobilize some 300,000 reservists, most of whom were sent to the Gaza front.

While these forces were assembled, the Israeli Air Force began a bombing campaign against the civilian infrastructure of Gaza, including hospitals, mosques, schools, and refugee camps, which shocked the world in terms of its lethality. By ignoring the fundamental precepts of international humanitarian law, Israel allowed itself to be characterized as a practitioner of genocide, and its actions against Gaza as war crimes. This is the core of the Hamas victory—the political defeat of Israel on the global stage, where international sympathies rapidly aligned with the people of Gaza and Palestine, and away from Israel. War, the Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously noted, is politics by other means. Hamas has proven the maxim to its fullest extent, accomplishing politically that which could only be initiated by Israel’s criminal use of force against the Palestinian people.

But even as international pressure began to accumulate for Israel to halt its offensive, Hamas was able to achieve what many outside observers had believed to be unthinkable—it fought the IDF to a standstill in Gaza itself, inflicting significant human and material losses on the IDF. After declaring that Israel would never agree to a ceasefire or an exchange of prisoners with Hamas, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suddenly caved into international pressure to sign up for what became a six-day “pause” where humanitarian goods were delivered to the Palestinian civilians in Gaza, and Palestinian prisoners held by Israel were exchanged for hostages seized by Hamas on October 7.

One of the major reasons for this decision lay not in the extreme pressure being put on Israel by the United States and its European allies for such an outcome, but the fact that the IDF was suffering serious losses on the battlefield in Gaza and along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah was engaged in military operations in support of Hamas. The casualties among Israeli main battle tanks were unsustainable, and the morale of the IDF soldiers was collapsing—indeed, Israel had to courts-martial two IDF officers who withdrew their battalion from the Gaza battlefield under pressure from Hamas.

Ritter

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“This coalition is breaking apart. Don’t think that they are strong, they will quit [politics]. We already said 50 to 60 days ago that Netanyahu is going away..”

• Erdogan Sees Netanyahu Balancing On Brink Of Collapse (TASS)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is balancing on the verge of collapse, something that he may indicate any time soon, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. “Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu is on the brink of collapse or bankruptcy right now. And he may make such an announcement at any moment,” the state-run Anadolu agency quoted the Turkish president as saying upon returning from Qatar. “And then there is the West which connives with the wrongdoings of both Netanyahu and his administration. Fortunately, the West has largely reconsidered its view of Israel since October 7,” Erdogan told Turkish journalists.

Erdogan described the ruling coalition in Israel as unhealthy. “This coalition is breaking apart. Don’t think that they are strong, they will quit [politics]. We already said 50 to 60 days ago that Netanyahu is going away,” the Turkish leader said. “Now, certain people emerge who are telling Israel: ‘We are tired of feeding you’,” he maintained. “Look at France that in the early days was making statements of support [for Israel]. Now French President [Emmanuel] Macron is making completely different statements,” the Turkish president said. “Many other Western countries, too, are no longer making the statements of the kind they were making in the first days [of the conflict],” Erdogan noted as he urged patience before the world revisits its attitude toward Israel’s actions.

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“For the Gulf States, relations with Russia are seen as an essential leverage in adapting to their changing relationship with the US..”

• Putin Visits to UAE, Saudi Arabia Prompted by Global Dynamics of Gaza War (Sp.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin arrived in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday to meet with UAE President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan and discuss bilateral, regional, and international affairs. As part of his brief Middle East tour, the Russian leader is also visiting Saudi Arabia, while later hosting Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in Moscow. Vladimir Putin’s visit to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia could be used by the Arab countries “as a signal, perhaps to the West,” to show that “we have other options and we’re not really happy with your policy towards Gaza,” Abdulaziz Algashian, a Saudi political analyst, told Sputnik. The Russian President’s trip to the Middle East comes amid turbulent developments in the region, with the Russian leader acutely aware of the “international dynamics of the Gaza war,” pointed out Algashian. He added that the Arab countries might seek to “leverage this visit and relations with Russia” relative to the Palestinian issue.

“For the Gulf States, relations with Russia are seen as an essential leverage in adapting to their changing relationship with the US,” agreed Sami Hamdi, Saudi political analyst and head of the International Interest, a risk analysis group. “There are concerns in the Gulf capitals that the US is no longer committed to their security or their interests, and there is therefore a belief that relations with Russia are essential in order to both advance their interests by pursuing alternative alliance structures and simultaneously strongarm Washington into upholding its commitment to them,” he pointed out. Looking ahead, “the extent of future cooperation with Russia as it stands remains dependent on the nature of the US-Gulf relationship. Although Gulf States will preserve their ties, the eagerness to expand those ties will correlate and fluctuate in accordance with the nature of their relationship with the US,” the Saudi political analyst speculated.

On a broader scale, there are a wide swathe of reasons for why Vladimir Putin chose this moment to embark upon his first foray to the region since 2019, underscored Algashian, a research fellow with SEPAD international research network and collaborative project based at Lancaster University’s Richardson Institute. These range from the Middle East’s resentment over the West’s stance on Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza to a need for further “entrenching” of economic relations, the pundit stressed.

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“Washington’s speculations about a potential stand-off show that “[US] authorities have finally lost touch with reality..”

• Russia Will Attack NATO – Biden (RT)

If Russia prevails in the Ukraine conflict, it may find itself in a position to launch an attack on NATO that could trigger a global conflict involving American troops, US President Joe Biden said on Wednesday, when he urged Congress to pass a $111 billion national security package. The bill, which was backed by Democrats, included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. He also lashed out at Republicans – who have been reluctant to support the measure due to disputes over security at the southern US border, saying that by doing so, they “are willing to give [Russian President Vladimir] Putin the greatest gift he could hope for.” “If Putin takes Ukraine, he won’t stop there,” Biden argued. “If Putin attacks a NATO ally…, well, we’ve committed as a NATO member that we’d defend every inch of NATO territory,” he stated, adding that Washington would like to avert this kind of a stand-off because it could result in “American troops fighting Russian troops.”

However, Republicans remained unconvinced, blocking the spending package in the Senate, with the final vote being 49 in favor and 51 against. The measure was opposed by all GOP lawmakers, as well as independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who normally votes with Democrats, but this time expressed concerns about Israel’s military strategy in the conflict with Hamas. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also voted “no” in order to have a chance to reintroduce the package later. Moscow’s ambassador to Washington Anatoly Antonov, commenting on Biden’s remarks about a potential clash between Russia and NATO, suggested that “such bogeyman stories are fabricated in order to justify to taxpayers and sober-minded political forces the huge expenses for ‘containing’ the Russian Federation.” Washington’s speculations about a potential stand-off show that “[US] authorities have finally lost touch with reality,” he added. “This kind of provocative rhetoric is unacceptable for a responsible nuclear state.”

Biden

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“..the Republicans as well as the Democrats, likely in consent with the White House, have so far blocked all further aid.”

• US Is Withholding Aid To Push Ukraine Towards Negotiations With Russia (MoA)

It would have been easy for the Democrats to commit a few billions for border security. But Biden wants to end the war in Ukraine. Starving it of money is the easiest way to push it towards negotiations. All this was planned by the Pentagon think tank RAND which, early this year, published a study about how to end the war in Ukraine: “Avoiding a Long War – U.S. Policy and the Trajectory of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict” (A 2019 study by RAND, Extending Russia – Competing from Advantageous Ground, had recommended to openly arm Ukraine to keep Russia busy. It has been the basis of U.S. Ukraine policy ever since.)

But in early 2023 RAND had turned a corner and argued that a prolonged war in Ukraine will be too costly for the U.S. to sustain: “The biggest Ukraine problem the White House currently has is President Vladimir Zelenski who has rejected any and all negotiations with Russia.” The RAND study had foreseen such a situation and had found ways to push Ukraine towards talks with Russia: “[T]he United States could decide to condition future military aid on a Ukrainian commitment to negotiations. Setting conditions on aid to Ukraine would address a primary source of Kyiv’s optimism that may be prolonging the war: a belief that Western aid will continue indefinitely or grow in quality and quantity. At the same time, the United States could also promise more aid for the postwar period to address Ukraine’s fears about the durability of peace. Washington has done so in other cases, …”
…
Linking aid to Ukrainian willingness to negotiate has been anathema in Western policy discussions and for good reason: Ukraine is defending itself against unprovoked Russian aggression. However, the U.S. calculus may change as the costs and risks of the war mount. And the use of this U.S. lever can be calibrated. For example, the United States could level off aid, not dramatically reduce it, if Ukraine does not negotiate. And, again, a decision to level off wartime support pending negotiations can be made in tandem with promises about postwar sustained increases in assistance over the long term. That was a nice plan. But how well the aid lever can be calibrated depends of course on Congress, not on the president’s say so.

There are also downsides to withholding or giving aid promises: “Clarifying the future of U.S. aid to Ukraine could create perverse incentives depending on how the policy is implemented. Committing to increased wartime assistance to Ukraine to reduce Russian optimism could embolden the Ukrainians to obstruct negotiations, blame failure on Moscow, and gain more Western support. Announcing a decrease or leveling off in assistance to Ukraine to reduce Kyiv’s optimism about the war could lead Russia to see the move as a signal of waning U.S. support for Ukraine. If it took this view, Russia might keep fighting in the hope that the United States would give up on Ukraine entirely. Although recognizing that Ukraine is fighting a defensive war for survival and Russia an aggressive war of aggrandizement, the United States would nonetheless have to carefully and dispassionately monitor events and target its efforts to create the intended effect on whichever side’s optimism is determined to be the key impediment to starting talks.

This would probably have been a good way to go if Biden had control over dispensing or withholding funds to Kiev. But the Republicans as well as the Democrats, likely in consent with the White House, have so far blocked all further aid. Their current path then seems to be a different one towards negotiations with Russia – regime change in Kiev. President Zelenski is unwilling to take up peace talks. If he can be pushed out of office during the next few months his likely replacement, General Zaluzny, will probably be more inclined to seek an end of the war. Thus the current tactic is to pressure Zelenski into leaving by withholding all future funds. If another Ukrainian leader comes in, aid might again flow to prevent a total takeover of the country by Russia. Still – the aid calibration would be a problem. So maybe giving up and leave, as Biden did in Afghanistan, might be the preferred option.

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“We remember the old quotes about the money being carted around in Iraq on palettes and not even weighed or metered… I think that that’s what’s happening again in Ukraine.”

• Is Ukraine Aid ‘Dead’? (Sp.)

Investigative journalist Christopher Helali joined Sputnik’s Political Misfits program Wednesday to discuss the growing opposition within the United States towards continued funding for Ukraine’s proxy conflict against Russia. The reported size of the latest proposed foreign aid package – some $110.5 billion – provoked incredulity from host John Kiriakou. “What has the United States not given Ukraine that would have such an enormous price tag?” asked Kirkiakou. Helali said that the “aid package is not only military assistance but also funding for rebuilding, for infrastructure… it’s funding for Ukraine, it’s funding for Israel, it’s also… a very small amount for the Palestinians.”
However Helali clarified that “Ukraine is at the forefront,” noting that the lion’s share of funding in the bill was earmarked for the Kiev regime.

“This is funding for rearmament, for new weapons systems, and things like that,” the analyst stressed. Rampant corruption in Ukraine has repeatedly stymied aspirations to join the European Union and other international bodies. Some Western politicians also point out the very high level of corruption in Ukraine. The business dealings of Hunter Biden in Ukraine, the son of US President Joe Biden, have also come under harsh criticism. President Biden has claimed he had no involvement in his son’s business ventures. “But of course there’s no real oversight,” added Helali, “there’s been a lot of reporting – I’m sure you’ve all been seeing it – about the rampant corruption, some officials have been buying yachts and houses and all sorts of fine luxury items. I think it’s going to be held up because there’s a lot of questions around this amount of money.”

Helali noted the large amounts of money that have gone unaccounted for in previous US-backed military operations, saying, “We remember the old quotes about the money being carted around in Iraq on palettes and not even weighed or metered… I think that that’s what’s happening again in Ukraine.” Funding for Ukraine did in fact fail in the US Senate on Wednesday when the legislative body refused to advance a supplemental foreign aid bill. Republican legislators, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have used the opportunity to call for increased funding for US border security to secure GOP support.

Helali said that increased border funding is a nonstarter for segments of the Democratic Party base, claiming they see US border policy as an ““instrument of oppression” and a “remnant of colonialism and US empire.” The journalist nevertheless believes the Biden administration will be forced to compromise on the issue, claiming, “I think eventually Democrats will have to cave because they need this funding.”

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Meet the new war expert.

• Yellen Says Ukraine’s Defeat Would Be Fault of the US (Sp.)

US lawmakers are debating a $111 billion supplemental spending package, of which $61 billion would be included for Ukraine. The spending package would also include funding for Israel, Taiwan, and US border security. During a trip to Mexico City on Tuesday, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US would be responsible for Ukraine’s defeat should Congress fail to approve US President Joe Biden’s latest supplemental spending package, according to media reports. “I’ve talked to members of Congress, my colleagues have. I think they understand this, that this is a dire situation and we can hold ourselves responsible for Ukraine’s defeat if we don’t manage to get this funding to Ukraine that’s needed, and I’m including direct budget support here because that’s utterly essential,” Yellen told the media.

At the US Institute of Peace this week, Andrey Yermak, President Vladimir Zelensky’s chief of staff, said not receiving this most recent spending package from the US exposes Ukraine to a “big risk” in losing its war. The package would include $61 billion to Ukraine, which is nearly as much as the US has already spent on helping to weaponize the country. The US government has spent more than $75 billion on Ukraine thus far, a figure that does not include all war-related spending which is estimated to be about $113 billion. “Ukraine is just running out of money,” Yellen said. “They’re spending more than every penny they’re taking in, in tax revenue, on military salaries and defense, and they wouldn’t have any schools or hospital or first responders if not for the money we’re sending to them to support them,” added the US Treasury Secretary.

[..] US House Speaker Mike Johnson said Republican support for the Biden Administration latest supplemental spending package will have to include permanent changes to the US border policy. Before any further spending, wrote Johnson, funding is first dependent upon “enactment of transformative change to our nation’s border security laws”. “Second,” Johnson wrote in a letter to Young, “Congress and the American people must be provided with answers to our repeated questions concerning: the Administration’s strategy to prevail in Ukraine; clearly defined and obtainable objectives; transparency and accountability for U.S. taxpayer dollars invested there; and what specific resources are required to achieve victory and a sustainable peace.”

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“But no one mentions that we have abetted the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainian men that will not be replaced. To fight a war that they cannot win..”

• US Aid To Ukraine Laundered Back To Military-Industrial Complex – Massie (RT)

The US Congress is continuing to vote in favor of sending billions of dollars to Ukraine because a lot of those funds end up being laundered back to the US military-industrial complex, Kentucky Representative Thomas Massie has said. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on X (formerly Twitter) published on Wednesday, the politician was asked to explain why Washington continued to push for more funding for Ukraine despite it becoming obvious that Kiev’s forces “cannot win.” Massie, who has repeatedly voted against sending money to fund Kiev’s operations, alleged that a lot of the funds that are sent to Ukraine ultimately end up “enriching” people within specific US districts and “stockholders, some of whom are congressmen.”

“You know, people are getting rich, so let’s do it. It’s an immoral argument, but it is one. But that’s not the argument they’re making in public,” he said, noting that those supporting the funding of Ukraine with US tax dollars are instead arguing that it is a “moral obligation” to do so. “You’re a bad person if you’re against this,” he complained, referring to a statement recently made by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who suggested that failing to support “the fight for freedom in Ukraine” meant letting Russian President Vladimir Putin “prevail.” “But no one mentions that we have abetted the killing of an entire generation of Ukrainian men that will not be replaced. To fight a war that they cannot win,” Massie noted.

The congressman surmised that, in order to support the US government’s proposals on Ukraine aid, a person has to be “economically illiterate and morally deficient.” Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden has hit out against Republicans like Massie, who have refused to aid packages to Ukraine, calling the failure to support Kiev “absolutely crazy” and “against US interests.” The US leader has repeatedly pledged that Washington would support Kiev for “as long as it takes” in its conflict with Russia.

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“..The goal and objective of Russia is demilitarization. Demilitarization could have been done peacefully. Right now it’s being done violently. And it means the absolute destruction of the Ukrainian military. And that is going to happen this winter. It will be destroyed in its totality.”

• Ukraine Won’t Get Operational Pause in Winter – Scott Ritter (Sp.)

It was expected that Zelensky would inform American congressmen about the latest developments on the ground in Ukraine and urge them to disburse over $60 billion for Ukraine.On the same day, the upper chamber failed to vote on a Ukraine aid bill because Democrats threw out GOP border reforms from it. In response, Republicans made it clear that they will not support any further assistance to Kiev unless border measures are included in the legislation. Meanwhile, the current Ukraine military package has almost been exhausted. There are also rumors in the Western press that NATO allies want Zelensky either to hold the talks or to freeze the conflict along the line of contact. Will the Kiev regime be forced to take a pause during the winter season?

“Well, what we won’t see is a pause,” Scott Ritter, former Marine intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector, told Sputnik. “I mean, the Ukrainians and even the collective West, they’re throwing terms out there like: ‘You know, it’s a frozen conflict. We fought them to a standstill.’ No, it’s not a frozen conflict and they haven’t fought the Russians to a standstill. Last winter, you know, the Ukrainians had their victory in Kharkov and Kherson. The Russians were consolidating their defenses, they had mobilized 300,000 men, and they were building the defenses. And so there was a pause that allowed [Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Gen. Valery] Zaluzhny to plan an operation. They had the luxury of time to build the nine, I think they actually built 12 brigades, equipped them, prepared them for this counteroffensive, etc.”

“Right now, we have a situation where the Russians are ready. Those 300,000 are fully trained. The majority of them have not been committed to the battlefield. In addition to that, over 450,000 volunteers and contract soldiers were absorbed. The Russians are at full strength with all the equipment, all the wherewithal. There will be no operational pause. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, have nothing to replace what’s happening. They’re now literally grabbing teenagers and pregnant women and putting them on the battlefield to fill the holes in the lines. There’s nothing coming behind, and the West is out of money. There’s no equipment. The Russians are not going to hit the pause button to give Ukraine a chance to catch their breath. The entire purpose of the Russian approach has been to grind the Ukrainians down to the point of exhaustion. And now we’re there.” [..] nobody is going to give Ukraine a pause, according to Ritter. While Moscow has repeatedly made it clear that it is open to constructive peace negotiations, the absence of Kiev’s initiative would mean the prolongation of the conflict, the former Marine officer believes.

“We’re going to see increasingly the elimination of cohesion on the battlefield as Ukrainians will retreat, as holes will be punched in the line. The Ukrainians are, I believe, in a very short period of time, going to be compelled to make a precipitous retreat back to more defensive positions. And that in itself is a very difficult military maneuver, one which Russia could exploit. You know, if they’re prepared to push them back even further, but this winter will be a winter of continued death and destruction for the Ukrainians. And the Russians will continue to put the pedal to the metal and keep putting the pressure on the Ukrainians. The goal and objective of Russia is demilitarization. Demilitarization could have been done peacefully. Right now it’s being done violently. And it means the absolute destruction of the Ukrainian military. And that is going to happen this winter. It will be destroyed in its totality.”

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Nikki=Corrupt

• Ramaswamy in GOP Presidential Debate Says Ukraine Conflict ‘Pointless’ (Sp.)

US entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy during the fourth Republican primary presidential debate said the Ukraine conflict is pointless and slammed former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley for not backing efforts to reach a peace deal. “I was the first person to say we need a reasonable peace deal in Ukraine. Now a lot of the neocons are quietly coming along to that position, with the exceptions of Nikki Haley and [President] Joe Biden, who still support what I believe is a pointless war in Ukraine,” Ramaswamy said on Tuesday during the debate in Alabama. Ramaswamy and Haley were joined on stage by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in what some expect to be the final debate of the 2024 primary. Haley maintains 9% support in the Republican Party primary, trailing former US President Donald Trump’s 64% support and DeSantis’ 16% support, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released in November.

Vivek Nikki
https://twitter.com/i/status/1732592114603794574

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“Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else..”

• Hunter Biden Threatened With Contempt Of Congress If He Bails On Testimony

Hunter Biden will be slapped with contempt of congress if he skips out on his Dec. 13 closed-door deposition, according to a Wednesday letter from House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to Hunter’s defense attorney, Abbe D. Lowell. “Contrary to the assertions in your letter, there is no ‘choice’ for Mr. Biden to make; the subpoenas compel him to appear for a deposition on December 13. If Mr. Biden does not appear for his deposition on December 13, 2023, the Committees will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” reads the letter, issued a week after Lowell suggested that Hunter should instead be allowed to testify publicly.

Hunter was subpoenaed on Nov. 8 to appear for a deposition before the committee. In response, Comer said: “Hunter Biden is trying to play by his own rules instead of following the rules required of everyone else,” adding “Our lawfully issued subpoena to Hunter Biden requires him to appear for a deposition on December 13.” Comer and Jordan are investigating extensive evidence that the Biden family was running an international influence peddling scheme, raking in tens of millions of dollars from foreign business partners despite no obvious product or service in exchange. House lawmakers are also seeking testimony from Hunter’s uncle James Biden, as well as multiple former business associates.

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“”The State Department is tasked with foreign relations and has no authority over domestic affairs..”

• US State Dept Sued For Conspiring To Censor American Media Companies (ZH)

Following bombshell censorship revelations exposed over the last year, beginning with the Twitter Files, the state of Texas, The Daily Wire, and The Federalist have filed a lawsuit against the US State Department on Tuesday, alleging that the government agency funded censorship technology designed to bankrupt domestic media outlets which have disfavored political opinions. According to the Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak; “The State Department is tasked with foreign relations and has no authority over domestic affairs, yet it took a government office designed for countering foreign terrorist propaganda, the Global Engagement Center (GEC), and unleashed it against Americans engaged in what it claimed was “disinformation,” according to the lawsuit, filed in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas on Tuesday night by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. It was “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” said the suit, which also names Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five other officials as defendants.”

Of note, the GEC, founded in 2011 under a different name to combat foreign propaganda in a counterterrorism capacity. In establishing the entity, Congress made clear that “none of the funds authorized” for the program “shall be used for purposes other than countering foreign propaganda.” They of course ignored all that, and turned its focus on Americans according to the complaint, using taxpayer funds to finance and promote censorship shops such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which target conservative outlets – ZeroHege included – with the stated goal of killing ad revenue. “Through its Global Engagement Center, the State Department actively intervened in the news-media market to limit the reach and business viability of domestic news organizations by funding censorship technology and private censorship enterprises,” reads a Wednesday press release from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. “The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”

As the lawsuit explains, The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and other conservative news organizations were “branded ‘unreliable’ or ‘risky’ by the government-funded and government-promoted censorship enterprises… starving them of advertising revenue and reducing the circulation of their reporting and speech—all as a direct result of [the State Department’s] unlawful censorship scheme.” The outlets are being represented by The New Civil Liberties Alliance’s Mark Chenoweth, who said that “the federal government cannot do indirectly what the First Amendment forbids it from doing directly.”

Read more …

 

 

 

 

Piers Corbyn

 

 

Robert Frost

 

 

Cat paws

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

Debt Rattle April 1 2020

Apr 012020
 
 April 1, 2020  Posted by at 10:50 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  51 Responses »


Byron In Chinatown, Pell Street, New York 1900

 

• Greek Mothers, Grandmas and Wives to Enforce Quarantine As Police Struggle (GR)
• White House Predicts 100,000 To 240,000 Will Die In US From Coronavirus (CNBC)
• Putin Asked Trump If He Needed Help & He Accepted (RT)
• How To Rescue Our Coronavirus-Infected Economy From Collapse (Richard Vague)
• Obama’s Failure To Resupply Respirators In Federal Stockpile (JTN)
• Do I Have to Pay My Rent or Mortgage During the Pandemic? (DB)
• Will Shift To Distance Learning Reshape American Education? (JTN)
• Should All Americans Be Wearing Face Masks? (JTN)
• Fed Will Do ‘Whatever It Takes’ To Help US Economy Likely In Recession (R.)
• US Virus Cases Off The Scale – But People Can Build Movement From This (MoA)
• China Starts To Report Asymptomatic Coronavirus Cases (R.)
• How Disinformation Really Works: Russian COVID19 Aid To Italy Smeared (RT)

 

 

The US is slowly coming to terms with the numbers representing its reality. And unlike fast food, they need to be fed the news in little bites.

 

 

• Cases 872,777 (+ 73,054 from yesterday’s 799,723)

• Deaths 43,271 (+ 4,551 from yesterday’s 38,720)

 

 

 

From Worldometer yesterday evening -before their day’s close-.

 

 

From Worldometer -NOTE: mortality rate for closed cases is at 19% –

 

 

From SCMP:

 

 

From COVID2019Live.info:

 

 

A good representation by Jo Michell of how the FT graph (see below) can be made clearer by tweaking between log scale and linear scale.

Log scale corona:

 

 

Linear scale corona:

 

 

 

 

Best story of the day for this day.

• Greek Mothers, Grandmas and Wives to Enforce Quarantine As Police Struggle (GR)

Greek Prime Minister Kiriakos Mitsotakis who was among the first EU leaders to implement a strict quarantine in Greece, in now transferring the authority of enforcing the quarantine to Greek women. The decision took most by storm but police sources say it was planned since a few weeks ago, when police was needed to help in hospitals in vital positions for the fight against Coronavirus. The PM made his decision known with a tweet in the early hours of Wednesday:

“Police will continue to assist in enforcing the quarantine if needed on a case by case basis, but this won’t be its primary responsibility,” a Greek official clarified. The amendment to the current quarantine law transfers the power of issuing the necessary permits primarily to mothers and grandmothers, as well as wives and sisters where there in no mother or grandmother.


“A checkpoint on Patission street. Groups of 3-4 women will be assembling in each neighbourhood during rush-hour to check cars and individuals if they are on the street legally.” Credit: Greek Government handout

“Women have been defending the Greek household for thousands of years, since the Ancient times when every Greek woman was the protector of ‘estia’” noted the President of the Hellenic Republic Katerina Sakellaropoulou. It is also true that women and especially Greek women are also experts on discovering germs and dirt where you think there is none, so this might be another skill that comes in handy. “If one person of the household is infected the whole family is in danger, notes Antonia Parisi who sees this as a necessary step for a family’s wellbeing. “Women are best to protect the family” adds the shop owner and mother of two from Piraeus, Greece.


[..] some Greeks are not happy by the move. Most complain that Greek mothers and wives are way stricter in accepting fair reasoning to go out during a pandemic. “I don’t know if I will ever see the light of the day,” says Petros Kakavas from Peristeri, Athens who in absence of a mother and a grandmother has to ask his wife for permission to leave the house. In ancient Sparta the male fighters’ health was a responsibility of their mothers and wives. It is since then, we have the saying behind every strong man there is an even stronger woman. But sometimes history just repeats itself.

Read more …

I got a lot of criticism on my Fauci article 2 days ago, thought I merely connected two things he said over the space of two days, which meant 200 million Americans would become infected. That number is still not mentioned for some reason, but soon it will have to be. For now 240,000 deaths are the new normal.

• White House Predicts 100,000 To 240,000 Will Die In US From Coronavirus (CNBC)

President Donald Trump prepared Americans for a coming surge in coronavirus cases, calling COVID-19 a plague and saying the U.S. is facing a “very, very painful two weeks.” “This could be a hell of a bad two weeks. This is going to be a very bad two, and maybe three weeks. This is going to be three weeks like we’ve never seen before,” Trump said at a White House press conference Tuesday. White House officials are projecting between 100,000 and 240,000 deaths in the U.S. with coronavirus fatalities peaking over the next two weeks. “When you look at night, the kind of death that has been caused by this invisible enemy, it’s incredible.” The U.S. has more coronavirus cases than any other country across the globe with 184,000 confirmed infections, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

New York has now become the new epicenter of the outbreak in the world with 75,795 confirmed cases as of Tuesday morning, more reported infections than China’s Hubei province where the coronavirus emerged in December. Earlier in the day, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the outbreak in the state may not peak for three weeks. “I’m tired of being behind this virus. We’ve been behind this virus from day one,” the governor said in Albany. “We underestimated this virus. It’s more powerful, it’s more dangerous than we expected.” Trump, who grew up near New York City’s Elmhurst hospital in Queens, said no one can believe officials are setting up refrigerator trucks as temporary mortuaries outside the hospital. Trump said New York “got a late start” in rolling out its mitigation efforts.

New York City is setting up a handful of makeshift field hospitals to house coronavirus patients at the Jacob K. Javits Center, in Central Park and at the tennis courts in Queens that host the U.S. Open. De Blasio said the city is working with the federal government, the hotel industry and various other businesses to turn other buildings into potential medical facilities. More than 1,000 people in New York City alone have already died from the coronavirus, according to data updated at 5 p.m. ET by the NYC Health Department. “This is going to be the roughest three weeks we’ve ever had in this country,” Trump said. “I wanted as few as a number of people to die as possible. And that’s all we’re working on.”

US coronavirus deaths:

3/1 2
3/2 6
3/3 9
3/4 11
3/5 12
3/6 17
3/7 19
3/8 21
3/9 26
3/10 31
3/11 38
3/12 41
3/13 49
3/14 58
3/15 65
3/16 87
3/17 111
3/18 149
3/19 195
3/20 263
3/21 323
3/22 413
3/23 541
3/24 704
3/25 938
3/26 1195
3/27 1588
3/28 2043
3/29 2419
3/30 3004
Now 4076

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“At least 400 people died TODAY in New York because of the coronavirus.

We have refrigerated trucks now set up all over the city to hold the bodies.

The morgues are at capacity.

Absolutely heartbreaking day.”

• Putin Asked Trump If He Needed Help & He Accepted (RT)

A cargo plane loaded with medical supplies and protection equipment may depart for the US by the end of Tuesday, the Kremlin said, after a phone call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The issue of protective gear was raised during the Monday phone talks, with Putin asking if the US needed help and Trump accepting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Tuesday. Moscow suggested the aid in anticipation that the US will be able to return the favor if necessary, once its manufacturers of medical and protective equipment catch up with demand, Peskov said. The current situation “affects everyone without exception and is of a global nature,” he added. “There is no alternative to acting together in the spirit of partnership and mutual assistance.”


On Monday, Trump told reporters at the White House press briefing that “Russia sent us a very, very large planeload of things, medical equipment, which was very nice.” The comment left everyone scratching their heads, as no one in the US seemed to know anything about the plane in question. It appears the US president was referring to the aid arranged on the phone call as something that had already happened. Peskov chastised “some of the American side” who “at least did not contribute to the prompt resolution of technical issues” regarding the agreed-upon delivery, which could explain the delay. Official data shows the US has been among the nations hardest-hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, with almost 175,000 confirmed cases and 3,416 deaths as of Tuesday afternoon – overtaking China, where the contagion originated in December. Italy still has the highest death toll in the world, at 12,428.

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Steve Keen: “an editorial in The Hill by Richard Vague, who is Pennsylvania’s acting Secretary of Banking and Securities. Richard was a highly successful banker, the co-founder of two major personal-finance-oriented companies Juniper Financial, and First USA Bank, and then CEO of the energy marketing company Energy Plus. He is a patron and a close friend. He is the author of “A Brief History of Doom” (2019), which I regard as the best history of financial crises ever written–far better than Kindleberger and Mackay.”

• How To Rescue Our Coronavirus-Infected Economy From Collapse (Richard Vague)

The U.S. government should implement a program of monthly checks of $1,000 for three months — a timeframe which could be extended — to individuals above 18 and below some income threshold, say $200,000. A one-time check is not enough. The continuity of these payments is the most central, critical recommendation. Even if Americans stay cooped up, they can and should be encouraged to spend across the board, including on things like restaurant gift certificates, since the restaurant industry alone now estimates up to 7 million job losses. Even ten years after the Great Recession, households and businesses still have near-record levels of debt and, with this GDP collapse, will now be drowning in that debt.

The U.S. government should institute an immediate three-month moratorium on payments of mortgages, credit cards and student debt, along with a similar moratorium policy for business loan payments. This should be extended beyond three months if necessary. Having spent much of my career in banking, I view this approach as feasible, as long as regulators have the guidance to allow it. As part of this, the federal government would implement this policy for government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, for government-guaranteed student loans and other lending programs that have its full or partial backing; the loans could be extended or restructured to accommodate this, and borrowers could continue to pay if they chose. Regulators also should work with the industry to put together other prudent forms of loan forbearance.

The government should implement a three-month moratorium on all rent payments, and establish a fund to extend money to landlords to accommodate this rent forbearance. It should implement a three-month moratorium on all federal tax payments, which could be extended if necessary. It should commit to cover all healthcare costs associated with the coronavirus, structured such that care providers can bill the government directly so no forms or reimbursements would be required of individuals. It also will be necessary to provide capital support for select, troubled industries beyond the airline, hotel and cruise ship industries. This part does not need to be a handout; it can take the form of a preferred equity investment. It will soon need to provide substantial support to states and local governments. This program will not provide a result that is perfect in its fairness, but the need to move quickly far outweighs that consideration.

Read more …

From a right wing source. A different view on this topic: “On March 1, 2003, the NPS became the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) program managed jointly by DHS and HHS. With the signing of the BioShield legislation, the SNS program was returned to HHS for oversight and guidance. In 2018, oversight of Strategic National Stockpile was transferred to HHS/ASPR from HHS/CDC.”

What does the move from CDC to Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response entail?

• Obama’s Failure To Resupply Respirators In Federal Stockpile (JTN)

The Strategic National Stockpile, America’s giant medical storage closet for a terrorist or biological crisis, once boasted more than 100 million respirator masks to protect doctors, nurses and other frontline health care workers in case of a contagion. But when the COVID-19 pandemic started a few months ago, the supply had dwindled down to just 12 million fitted masks, known as N95 respirators, and 30 million surgical masks, a supply deemed to be less than 2 percent of what the nation would need for full-blown pandemic. The tale of how such a critical supply lapsed, leading the Trump administration to scramble for 500 million new masks in the midst of pandemic, is one of government neglect and competing priorities that began in 2009.

That’s when the Obama administration drew down nearly 97 million of the masks to deal with the H1N1 swine flu pandemic, effectively protecting frontline medical workers from a virus that infected more than 60 million Americans. But when it was over, the administration decided not to fully restock the respirators, choosing to spend its $600 million annual budget for the stockpile on other priorities such as key drugs and vaccines to deal with smallpox, anthrax and the like, experts said. There is really “no answer why the supplies were not replenished because the N95 masks are invaluable tools for preparedness and it was important that they be restocked,” said Charles Johnson, President of International Safety Equipment Association, whose members make supplies for the stockpile.

In the end, Johnson said, the Obama administration chose to use its “limited funds” in other ways and “made the best choices at the time even though his association and others periodically restated their calls to replenish” the N95 masks. That trend continued in the early Trump years as well. The Clinton administration first began to examine a national plan to respond to pandemics and create the federal stockpile in 1990s. But the formal National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza was not officially published until 2005 during the George W. Bush administration, following the anthrax scare in 2001 and the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2002.

[..] According to a Center for Disease Control report published after the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, 39 million N95 masks were initially distributed from the stockpile, followed by 59.5 million more in second wave. According to Johnson, the stockpile originally was about 100 million masks. From April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were over 60 million cases of H1N1 requiring 274,304 hospitalizations and resulting in 12,469 deaths in the United States. After the H1N1 virus slowed down in 2010, according to Johnson, “it was important to restock.” That did not happen as the national stockpile budget focused on other priorities deemed higher.

Read more …

Literally every single state appears to have different rules?!

• Do I Have to Pay My Rent or Mortgage During the Pandemic? (DB)

As March winds down, at least 250 million Americans have been told to stay home or “shelter in place” to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Problem is, many can’t help wondering if they can still afford a place to shelter in—if they ever could. Long before the coronavirus pandemic, generous swaths of the United States faced an affordable housing crisis. With millions of Americans losing their jobs and millions more facing unemployment in the near future thanks to a concerted economic shutdown geared at reining in the disease, talk of rent strikes and freezes are in the air.

The Trump administration recently nodded to the problem by ordering a foreclosure moratorium on single-family home mortgages backed by the Federal Housing Administration or obtained through government-owned lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie have also offered forbearance for borrowers experiencing hardship. And the finance giants have dangled payment relief to indebted apartment building owners who grant respite to renters, a move the Federal Housing Finance Agency estimates could affect 43 percent of the market in multifamily leases. Then there’s the $2 trillion stimulus bill that passed last week, which contains language forbidding evictions and late charges on any property receiving virtually any federal aid.

It also permits those owing money to Fannie or Freddie to request up to six months of forbearance, though it leaves the onus on borrowers to do so. If your home doesn’t fall under one of these categories or programs, and you’re wondering if you owe money to your landlord or lender, the answer is probably yes—at least for now. Still, some state and local governments have moved to stem evictions and foreclosures for everyone, and a few are even freezing rent and mortgage payments entirely. Here’s a breakdown of COVID-19 rules on housing across every state and many large metropolitan areas. This story will be updated as events warrant.

Read more …

Like, make it even worse?

• Will Shift To Distance Learning Reshape American Education? (JTN)

It likely represents one of the most ambitious, albeit uncoordinated, educational experiments in history: Can you successfully digitize an entire country’s higher education industry very nearly overnight? And if so, what does that say about the future of distance learning? Where does it go from here? Distance education itself is already widespread throughout the United States: The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that in the fall of 2017 there were well over 6.5 million American students enrolled in online programs, nearly a third of all postsecondary students in the country. Nearly half of those were exclusively enrolled in online programs; slightly more than half had “at least one” online course.

When they hear of online education, most people might picture private, for-profit corporations, the ones that build vanilla, office park-like campuses in the suburbs of American cities and whose commercials pop up regularly on network television and YouTube advertisements: Strayer, the University of Phoenix, DeVry University. Yet those establishments form a relatively small minority of the overall online education industry: the NCES says the vast majority of students who attend virtual classrooms do so at more traditional institutions. Not even 15% of all online attendance is done at private, for-profit organizations.

Distance education, then, is very much a concern for legacy institutions, including those known for their idyllic and venerated campus experiences: Schools like Harvard and Princeton and Northwestern and Chicago all have their own exclusively online divisions, while more and more state and regional schools are expanding their digital opportunities. Indeed, the existence of those programs is likely why many American schools were able to transition with (relative) ease to online learning environments. A vital question to ask, then, is: Does this near-total transition to online learning suggest an upcoming major shift in the distance education economy? Will schools be able to use this monumental adjustment to expand online learning and perhaps fundamentally reshape American higher education?

Dr. Wallace Boston, the president of the private, for-profit, online American Public University System, says yes. “I believe we will see an uptick in distance education” following the pandemic, he told Just the News. “The most likely reason that we will see an uptick is that many institutions will want to keep some form of online instruction and infrastructure in the event that this pandemic recycles through again or that there is another event that might require social distancing or quarantines,” he argued. “Some may even view online offerings as strategic opportunities for their institution.”

Read more …

Before or after they’ve been tested?

• Should All Americans Be Wearing Face Masks? (JTN)

[California] Gov. Gavin Newsom Tuesday said that the state is considering guidance around whether people beyond the medical profession should wear some sort of mask or face covering, including in professions like grocery store workers. The science is incomplete in this area, according to Newsom, and there is a concern that people will think masks are a replacement for social distancing, which they aren’t. Surgeon General Jerome Adams has said that the practice often leads to increased touching of one’s face and can produce a “false sense of security,” adding that the World Health Organization and the CDC have reaffirmed in the last few days is that they do not recommend the general public wear masks.

“The virus is not spreading in the general community,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the Center for the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said in a Jan. 30 briefing. “We don’t routinely recommend the use of face masks by the public to prevent respiratory illness. And we certainly are not recommending that at this time for this new virus.” As the cases of COVID-19 grows across America and supplies like face masks and gowns are in short supply, health experts say implementing guidance may take masks away from the health care providers who are on the frontlines of the pandemic. However others believe that masks, even homemade masks, would help reduce the risk of unknowingly spreading the virus through coughs, sneezes, even yawns or simple conversation.

George Gao, director-general of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said in an interview with Science magazine that “when you speak, there are always droplets coming out of your mouth.” “The big mistake in the U.S. and Europe, in my opinion, is that people aren’t wearing masks,” Gao said. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Tuesday that the White House coronavirus task force is also seriously considering guidance that Americans wear masks. “The idea of getting a much more broad, community-wide use of masks outside of the health care setting is under very active discussion at the task force. The CDC group is looking at that very carefully,” Fauci told CNN.

Read more …

Poor choice of words perhaps? To hide the emptiness implied?

• Fed Will Do ‘Whatever It Takes’ To Help US Economy Likely In Recession (R.)

The Federal Reserve is ready to do more to help a U.S. economy ground to a sudden halt as businesses shutter and people stay home to slow the coronavirus pandemic, San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly said on Tuesday. “The Federal Reserve is prepared to do whatever it takes within our powers to ensure that we are part of the solution of shoring up people over the virus, shoring up the American economy and putting us in the best position to grow again once the virus recedes,” Daly said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. “If we do the right thing and shelter in place and curb the spread of the virus, the economy will be in the best position to bounce back.”


With the coronavirus infecting tens of thousands of Americans and killing hundreds each day, three-quarters of the U.S. population are under orders to stay home except for essential trips to slow the spread of the virus. With businesses laying off millions of workers as demand dries up and states ordering non-essential businesses to close, the economy is likely already in recession, Daly said. The Fed’s job, along with that of the U.S. government that on Friday finalized a $2.2 trillion rescue package, is to provide the support to financial markets, businesses and people who are doing their duty to boost the public health, Daly said. Once the pandemic threat has passed, the Fed’s programs and low interest rates will help drive the economic recovery, she said.

Read more …

FTCoronaGraphMar31

Is Moon of Alabam going full hippie on us?

• US Virus Cases Off The Scale – But People Can Build Movement From This (MoA)

When John Burn-Murdoch created that daily updated chart he did not anticipate that any country would have more than a 100,000 total cases. That was a reasonable assumption as China, with 1.4 billion inhabitants, stopped the epidemic with less than 85.000 total cases even when it was surprised by the outbreak. As of now the U.S. has 164.435 known cases. It will reach a total number of several dozens of millions and will have several hundreds of thousands of dead caused by the covid-19 disease. Most but not all of those who will die from it will have one or more co-morbid diseases.

The number of death in the U.S. will likely be higher than elsewhere because obesity, diabetes and heart problems are more prevalent in the U.S. than in most other countries. Another reason why the U.S. will have a larger than necessary outbreak is wide mistrust in the authority of the state. A significant number of people will reject stay at home orders or other measures the authorities will have to take. Then there is this: Pouya Alimagham @iPouya – 0:48 UTC · Mar 31, 2020 “The regime doesn’t want to antagonize the religious classes. Thus, it isn’t doing anything about the fact that some religious sites remain open & clerics are encouraging worshippers to come & pray. These gatherings risk exploding #COVID19. I’m talking about the US, not #Iran.”

The U.S. also has many people without health insurance. The many newly laid off people will additionally lose theirs. These people will avoid seeing a doctor or to go to a hospital as the enormous costs would ruin them. The for-profit health system will reject sick persons who are unlikely to be able to pay their bills. The cases of people who die from such circumstance should be put into the death by lack of money category instead of being blamed on something else. Congress has failed to take the necessary measures and to give everyone access to free tests and free care. This will come back to bite everyone as it makes sure that the disease will circulate longer and stronger than in other rich countries.

Every crisis is also a chance. Congress has used it to again loot the people and to push more money to the rich. At the same time the powers that be have denied universal healthcare and paid sick leave to those who need it. The covid-19 epidemic is a chance to change that. There are already a number of strikes at Amazon and similar companies over work safety, health care and pay. Rent strikes must now follow. When the bills come in for families with covid-19 cases many more people will get more interested in medicare for all. A movement can be build from these issues. The Sanders campaign should provide a (virtual) platform for it.

The U.S. has enough money to pay for the security of its people. Security is not a military issue. A hugely expensive aircraft carrier with sick sailors is worth nothing. Pandemics are a real security issues and the U.S. has left its people defenseless against them. Cut the aircraft carriers and other insane military spending and invest it in the health of the people. That message will soon be widely understood. We can all help to reinforce it.

Read more …

Q: how useless is this if you test only some people? Can’t very well adopt the western idea of testing only those who look sick.

• China Starts To Report Asymptomatic Coronavirus Cases (R.)

Chinese health authorities began on Wednesday reporting on asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus as part of an effort to allay public fears that people could be spreading the virus without knowing they are infected with it. China, where the coronavirus emerged late last year, has managed to bring its outbreak under control and is easing travel restrictions in virus hot spots. But there are concerns that the end of lockdowns will see thousands of infectious people move back into daily life without knowing they carry the virus, because they have no symptoms and so have not been tested. Up to now, the number of known asymptomatic cases has been classified, and it is not included in the official data, though the South China Morning Post newspaper, citing unpublished official documents, recently said it was more than 40,000.


In an effort to dispel public fears about hidden cases of the virus, the government has this week ordered health authorities to turn their attention to finding asymptomatic cases and releasing their data on them. Health authorities in Liaoning province were the fist to do so on Wednesday, saying the province had 52 cases of people with the coronavirus who showed no symptoms as of March 31, they said in a statement on a provincial government website. Hunan province said it had four such cases, all of them imported from abroad, it said in a statement on its website. The National Health Commission is due to start reporting aggregate, national data on asymptomatic cases later on Wednesday.

Read more …

Unthinkable now, but soon Americans will be thanking Putin, and thanking Trump.

• How Disinformation Really Works: Russian COVID19 Aid To Italy Smeared (RT)

With over 11,000 deaths and more than 100,000 cases of Covid-19, Italy is currently a country which feels under siege. But this is no impediment to the think tank racket twisting an offer of support for its propaganda purposes. Here’s what happened. The weekend before last, Vladimir Putin called Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte. During the conversation, Conte asked for help, in fighting coronavirus, according to the Kremlin readout which hasn’t been contradicted by Italian officials. Let’s be clear from the outset, there was undoubtably a strong PR, as well as practical, element to Russia’s assistance. However, there were also advantages to Rome from this approach, as the move may have helped to concentrate a few minds among its traditional allies.

Moscow sent teams of “doctors, protective gear and medical equipment” to the stricken country. The detail included 100 military virologists and epidemiologists, along with eight medical teams, according to Russian news outlets. Most importantly, it delivered 600 ventilators. A significant amount given Italy apparently had only about 5,000 of the devices. Indeed, a few days after the Putin/Conte call, the New York Times was writing about Italy’s “ventilator crisis.” There’s usually nothing like a bit of Russian influence to jolt EU and NATO elites into action. As mentioned above, no doubt this was also part of Conte’s reasoning. That said, it’s also worth mentioning that some other Europeans states have tried to help the Italians. Germany and France, in particular, took patients and sent supplies, despite dealing with outbreaks of their own. Yet, many in Italy feel they haven’t done enough.

A few days after the aid landed, a campaign began on Twitter to discredit the Russian initiative. The first I saw of it was a tweet from Oliver Carroll, of London’s Independent newspaper, who presumably speaks Italian (I don’t, so I am relying on his translation). “Some Italians are expressing unease about Putin’s Covid-19 emergency aid,” he wrote. “Acc(ording) to La Stampa, 80 percent of supplies (are) “useless,” (and) sources worry about high-ranking military officers now in (the) country. Russian soldiers (are) free to roam (in) Italy a few steps away from NATO,” the paper stated. “La Stampa says China sent masks (and) ventilators; (but) Russia sent irrelevant equipment used for bacteriological and chemical outbreaks,” Carroll added. “(There is a) belief that Russia … (is) not helping us only for great goodness of its people… now beginning to circulate in broad sectors, military and political.”

Read more …

 

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“Our leaders, if they think of empathy at all, think in terms of Steve Martin’s advice: ‘Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.’”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Debt Rattle February 9 2019

Feb 092019
 
 February 9, 2019  Posted by at 11:03 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,  5 Responses »


Pablo Picasso Le pigeon aux petits pois (Pigeon with Peas) – stolen May 20 2010 1911

 

• German Industrial Production Falls Most Since 2009. New Orders Plummet (WS)
• Fed’s QE Unwind Reaches $434 Billion, Remains on “Autopilot” (WS)
• UK Forcing Poor Nations Into Risky Post-Brexit Trade Deals (Ind.)
• Acting AG Whitaker Says He Has Not Meddled In Russia Inquiry (AP)
• US Faces A Catastrophic Food Supply Crisis, As Farmers Struggle (SHTF)
• The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q4 2018 (WS)
• Bezos, Amazon And Privacy (Greenwald)
• Leaked Wikileaks Doc Reveals US Military Use of IMF, World Bank (MPN)
• Venezuela: The US’s 68th Regime Change Disaster (AntiWar)
• US In Direct Contact With Venezuelan Military, Urging Defections (R.)
• Venezuela’s Maduro Spurns US Aid, Rival Warns Military Not To Block It (R.)
• Dreams Die Hard (Kunstler)
• Wiped Out Before Our Eyes’ Hawaii Proposes Ban On Shark Killings (G.)

 

 

Almost off the news radar, Germany’s problems get serious, and drag Europe down with it.

• German Industrial Production Falls Most Since 2009. New Orders Plummet (WS)

“Unexpectedly,” German industrial production fell 3.9% in December 2018 compared to December 2017, after having fallen by a revised 4.0% in November, according to German statistics agency Destatis Thursday morning. These two drops were steepest year-over-year drops since 2009. Even during the European Debt Crisis in 2011 and 2012 – it hit Germany’s industry hard as many European countries weaved in and out of a recession, with some countries sinking into a depression — German industrial production never fell as fast on a year-over-year basis as in November and December:

The declines on a year-over-year basis were broad: Without construction, industrial production fell 3.9% year-over-year in December, after having fallen 4.5% in November. And just manufacturing production, which includes mining and quarrying, fell 4.0% year-over-year in December, after having fallen 4.6% in November. On a longer-term scale, the industrial production index peaked in May 2018 and has since fallen 4.6%. It is now back where it had first been in February 2017:

And industrial production is not getting a whole lot better any time soon as new orders for the manufacturing sector have plunged – according to data released by Destatis on Wednesday. New orders dropped 7.0% year-over-year in December (adjusted for calendar differences), after having fallen 3.4% in November and 3.0% in October. In fact, orders have fallen seven months in a row on a year-over year basis in ever larger drops. The chart below shows the decline in each month compared to the same month a year earlier — with a sharp deterioration at the end of the year:

Read more …

As I’ve said before, tweaking rates is sort of an instant measure, but re-purchasing $434 billion in assets takes much longer. If only because the Fed will cause a panic if they try.

• Fed’s QE Unwind Reaches $434 Billion, Remains on “Autopilot” (WS)

The Fed shed $32 billion in assets in January, according to the Fed’s balance sheet for the week ended February 6, released this afternoon. This reduced the assets on its balance sheet to $4,026 billion, the lowest since January 2014. Since the beginning of this “balance sheet normalization,” the Fed has now shed $434 billion.

[..] the questions going forward are these: One, will the Fed continue to trim its balance sheet on “autopilot,” or will it deviate from plan and slow or stop the balance sheet reductions; Or two, will the Fed reverse course and restart QE all over again at any moment now, as the biggest Wall Street hype-mongers have prophesied; Or three, will the Fed tweak the roll-off – as a slew of Fed governors have suggested – to where it would get rid of its MBS more quickly by outright selling them; and by replacing some of them with short-term Treasury bills to lower the balance sheet’s average maturity, which currently is over eight years.

Over the next few months, the Fed will likely announce some tantalizing tidbits about how it might tweak the balance-sheet reduction. One of those tidbits will likely relate to how it will shed MBS faster and replace those additional reductions of MBS with short-term Treasury bills. The effects of this may not be what the markets had hoped for in their wildest dreams. And the Fed will likely dole out more clues about how much further it wants to cut its balance sheet. But all this will take months, and until those tweaks are nailed down and announced, the balance sheet normalization will proceed on autopilot at its by now customary glacial pace.

Read more …

Dreams of empire. France does the exact same thing.

• UK Forcing Poor Nations Into Risky Post-Brexit Trade Deals (Ind.)

Some of the world’s poorest countries are being forced to agree potentially damaging trade deals with the UK by government “threats” in the rush to Brexit, campaigners say. Liam Fox, the international trade secretary, is accused of piling pressure on developing nations to “sign up blind” – without knowing the value of the deals – with a warning they will otherwise be lost. Just three of the 40 agreements the UK enjoys through EU membership, covering 71 countries, have been successfully “rolled over” – as the government promised – with Brexit day just seven weeks away. Now the Department for International Trade is under fire for telling the countries concerned they risk punishing tariffs on crucial exports to the UK, unless they re-sign the deals in time.

Among them are Ghana, which relies on banana sales, Mauritius (tuna), Kenya (flowers), Cote d’Ivoire (cocoa), Namibia (grapes and beef), Swaziland (sugar), and scores of other developing countries in Africa, the Caribbean and Central America. And, says the fair trade charity Traidcraft Exchange, they risk a legal challenge at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) under an extraordinary plan to treat EU parts as originating from the UK. “The continuity agreements are being rushed because of the threat of no deal. Countries are being asked to sign up blind,” said Liz May, the charity’s head of policy.

“Without the full picture of how the EU and UK will trade in the future, it is impossible for countries to judge what these deals are really worth, how they will work in practice or even how some elements will be enforced. “Instead of acknowledging this difficulty, the government is relying on developing countries being compelled to sign up at the last minute, rather than risk high tariffs being slapped on their key exports. “This type of bad-faith negotiating – using implicit threats to get countries ‘over the line’ – is not a great way to start the UK’s independent trade policy.”

Read more …

“I’m thinking about maybe we just set up a popcorn machine in the back because that’s what this is becoming. It’s becoming a show..”

The Senate will vote on Barr next week anyway, so why the showboating carnival?

• Acting AG Whitaker Says He Has Not Meddled In Russia Inquiry (AP)

The acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, said on Friday that he has “not interfered in any way” in the special counsel’s Russia investigation as he faced a contentious congressional hearing in his waning days on the job. The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee was the first, and likely only, chance for newly empowered Democrats in the majority to grill an attorney general they perceive as a Donald Trump loyalist, and whose appointment they suspect was aimed at suppressing investigations of the Republican president. Democrats confronted Whitaker on his past criticism of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s work and his refusal to recuse himself from overseeing it, attacked him over his prior business dealings, and sneeringly challenged his credentials as the country’s chief law enforcement officer.

“We’re all trying to figure out: who are you, where did you come from and how the heck did you become the head of the Department of Justice,” said congressman Hakeem Jeffries. When Whitaker tried to respond, the New York Democrat interrupted: “Mr Whitaker, that was a statement, not a question. I assume you know the difference.” Yet Democrats yielded no new information about the status of the Mueller invesetigation as Whitaker repeatedly refused to discuss conversations with the president or answer questions that he thought might reveal details. Though clearly exasperated – he drew gasps and chuckles when he told the committee chairman that his five-minute time limit for questions was up – Whitaker nonetheless sought to assuage Democratic concerns by insisting he had never discussed the Mueller probe with Trump or other White House officials, and that there’d been no change in its “overall management”.

“We have followed the special counsel’s regulations to a T,” Whitaker said. “There has been no event, no decision, that has required me to take any action, and I have not interfered in any way with the special counsel’s investigation.” Republicans made clear they viewed the hearing as pointless political grandstanding, especially since Whitaker may have less than a week left in the job, and some respected his wishes by asking questions about topics other than Mueller’s inquiry into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign. The Senate is expected to vote as soon as next week on confirming William Barr, Trump’s pick for attorney general. “I’m thinking about maybe we just set up a popcorn machine in the back because that’s what this is becoming. It’s becoming a show,” said the Republican congressman Doug Collins ,of Georgia, who accused his Democratic colleagues of “character assassination”.

Read more …

The US food crisis is exclusively caused by Big Ag and Monsanto. Farmers depending on China is not in their interest.

• US Faces A Catastrophic Food Supply Crisis, As Farmers Struggle (SHTF)

American farmers are battling several issues when it comes to producing our food. Regulated low prices, tariffs, and the inability to export have all cut into the salaries of farmers. They are officially in crisis mode, just like the United States’ food supply. “The farm economy’s in pretty tough shape,” said John Newton, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation. “When you look out on the horizon of things to come, you start to see some cracks.” Average farm income has fallen to near 15-year lows under president Donald Trump’s policies, and in some areas of the country, farm bankruptcies are soaring. And with slightly higher interest rates, many don’t see borrowing more money as an option.

“A lot of farmers are going to give the president the benefit of the doubt, and have to date. But the longer the trade war goes on, the more that dynamic changes,” said Brian Kuehl, executive director of Farmers for Free Trade, according to Politico. With no end to the disastrous trade war in sight, many farmers have traveled to Washington to share their plights with the president himself hoping that he’ll end the trade war that’s exacerbating an already precarious food crisis. Farmers make up a fairly large chunk of president Trump’s base, and an unwillingness to put food production in the United States first could be detrimental for Trump reelection chances in 2020. It could also be the beginning of a catastrophic food shortage.

Read more …

“It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it: Propping up the massive US economy.”

• The State of the American Debt Slaves, Q4 2018 (WS)

It’s a tough job, but someone’s got to do it: Propping up the massive US economy. And consumers are doing it, but in a somewhat lackadaisical manner when it comes to spending money they don’t have. Consumer debt – more enticingly, “consumer credit” similar to “extra credit” – rose 4.7% in the fourth quarter 2018 compared to the fourth quarter last year. In the year 2018, Americans added $179 billion to their balances on their credit cards, auto loans, and student loans. Every dime was spent and added to GDP. It amounted to nearly 1% of GDP. If GDP grew 3.1% in 2018, just under one third of the growth was generated by that additional consumer debt.

Without this additional consumer borrowing, if consumers had just maintained their debt levels, GDP growth might only have been 2.2% in 2018, instead of 3.1%. So, a huge round of applause is due our debt slaves that now owe over $4 trillion for the first time ever, according to the Federal Reserve Thursday afternoon. Consumer debt includes auto loans, student loans, credit-card debt, and personal loans, but it excludes housing related debt, such as mortgages and HELOCs. The $4.01 trillion in consumer debt is up 52% from the peak early in the Financial Crisis in Q3 2008. This is not adjusted for inflation. Over the same period, the Consumer Price Index rose 16% and nominal GDP rose 39%. Thus, Americans are sticking to their time-honored plan of out-borrowing both inflation (by a big margin) and economic growth.

Read more …

Summary: Trump accused of using the same FBI that spies on him, to spy on Bezos, who’s in bed with the FBI.

I may have temporarily lost the thread, and the logic.

• Bezos, Amazon And Privacy (Greenwald)

On Thursday, Bezos published emails in which the Enquirer’s parent company explicitly threatened to publish intimate photographs of Bezos and his mistress, which were apparently exchanged between the two through their iPhones, unless Bezos agreed to a series of demands involving silence about the company’s conduct. [..] Despite a lack of evidence, MSNBC is already doing what it exists to do – implying with no evidence that Trump is to blame (in this case, by abusing the powers of the NSA or FBI to spy on Bezos). But, under the circumstances, those are legitimate questions to be probing (though responsible news agencies would wait for evidence before airing innuendo of that sort).

If Bezos were the political victim of surveillance state abuses, it would be scandalous and dangerous. It would also be deeply ironic. That’s because Amazon, the company that has made Bezos the planet’s richest human being, is a critical partner for the U.S. Government in building an ever-more invasive, militarized and sprawling surveillance state. Indeed, one of the largest components of Amazon’s business, and thus one of the most important sources of Bezos’ vast wealth and power, is working with the Pentagon and the NSA to empower the U.S. Government with more potent and more sophisticated weapons, including surveillance weapons.

In December, 2017, Amazon boasted that it had perfected new face-recognition software for crowds, which it called Rekognition. It explained that the product is intended, in large part, for use by governments and police forces around the world. The ACLU quickly warned that the product is “dangerous” and that Amazon “is actively helping governments deploy it.” “Powered by artificial intelligence,” wrote the ACLU, “Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces.” “Amazon’s Rekognition raises profound civil liberties and civil rights concerns.”

Read more …

The core of the Venezuela crisis: “Hugo Chávez, broke ties with the IMF and World Bank, which he noted were “dominated by US imperialism.” Instead Venezuela and other left-wing governments in Latin America worked together to co-found the Bank of the South..”

• Leaked Wikileaks Doc Reveals US Military Use of IMF, World Bank (MPN)

In a leaked military manual on “unconventional warfare” recently highlighted by WikiLeaks, the U.S. Army states that major global financial institutions — such as the World Bank, IMF, and the OECD — are used as unconventional, financial “weapons in times of conflict up to and including large-scale general war,” as well as in leveraging “the policies and cooperation of state governments.” The document, officially titled “Field Manual (FM) 3-05.130, Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare” and originally written in September 2008, was recently highlighted by WikiLeaks on Twitter in light of recent events in Venezuela as well as the years-long, U.S.-led economic siege of that country through sanctions and other means of economic warfare. Though the document has generated new interest in recent days, it had originally been released by WikiLeaks in December 2008 and has been described as the military’s “regime change handbook.”

WikiLeaks’ recent tweets on the subject drew attention to a single section of the 248-page-long document, titled “Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare.” This section in particular notes that the U.S. government applies “unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors,” and specifically names the World Bank, IMF and the OECD, as well as the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), as “U.S. diplomatic-financial venues to accomplish” such goals.

[..] Given the close relationship between the U.S. government and these international financial institutions, it should come as little surprise that – in Venezuela – the U.S.-backed “interim president” Juan Guaidó – has already requested IMF funds, and thus IMF-controlled debt, to fund his parallel government. This is highly significant because it shows that top among Guaidó’s objectives, in addition to privatizing Venezuela’s massive oil reserves, is to again shackle the country to the U.S.-controlled debt machine. As the Grayzone Project recently noted: Venezuela’s previous elected socialist president, Hugo Chávez, broke ties with the IMF and World Bank, which he noted were “dominated by US imperialism.” Instead Venezuela and other left-wing governments in Latin America worked together to co-found the Bank of the South, as a counterbalance to the IMF and World Bank.”

Read more …

So many millions of victims nobody tries to count anymore.

• Venezuela: The US’s 68th Regime Change Disaster (AntiWar)

In his masterpiece, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, William Blum, who died in December 2018, wrote chapter-length accounts of 55 US regime change operations against countries around the world, from China (1945-1960s) to Haiti (1986-1994). Noam Chomsky’s blurb on the back of the latest edition says simply, “Far and away the best book on the topic.” We agree. If you have not read it, please do. It will give you a clearer context for what is happening in Venezuela today, and a better understanding of the world you are living in. Since Killing Hope was published in 1995, the US has conducted at least 13 more regime change operations, several of which are still active: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; the 3rd US invasion of Haiti since WWII; Somalia; Honduras; Libya; Syria; Ukraine; Yemen; Iran; Nicaragua; and now Venezuela.

William Blum noted that the US generally prefers what its planners call “low intensity conflict” over full-scale wars. Only in periods of supreme overconfidence has it launched its most devastating and disastrous wars, from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. After its war of mass destruction in Iraq, the US reverted to “low intensity conflict” under Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war. Obama conducted even heavier bombing than Bush II, and deployed US special operations forces to 150 countries all over the world, but he made sure that nearly all the bleeding and dying was done by Afghans, Syrians, Iraqis, Somalis, Libyans, Ukrainians, Yemenis and others, not by Americans. What US planners mean by “low intensity conflict” is that it is less intense for Americans.

[..] While Venezuelans face poverty, preventable diseases, malnutrition and open threats of war by US officials, those same US officials and their corporate sponsors are looking at an almost irresistible gold mine if they can bring Venezuela to its knees: a fire sale of its oil industry to foreign oil companies and the privatization of many other sectors of its economy, from hydroelectric power plants to iron, aluminum and, yes, actual gold mines. This is not speculation. It is what the US’s new puppet, Juan Guaido, has reportedly promised his American backers if they can overthrow Venezuela’s elected government and install him in the presidential palace.

Read more …

“..a source in Washington close to the opposition expressed doubts whether the Trump administration has laid enough groundwork to spur a wider mutiny in the ranks..”

• US In Direct Contact With Venezuelan Military, Urging Defections (R.)

The US is holding direct communications with members of Venezuela’s military urging them to abandon President Nicolas Maduro and is also preparing new sanctions aimed at increasing pressure on him, a senior White House official said. The Trump administration expects further military defections from Maduro’s side, the official told Reuters, despite only a few senior officers having done so since opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself interim president last month, earning the recognition of the United States and dozens of other countries. “We believe these to be those first couple pebbles before we start really seeing bigger rocks rolling down the hill,” the official said this week, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We’re still having conversations with members of the former Maduro regime, with military members, although those conversations are very, very limited.”

With the Venezuelan military still apparently loyal to Maduro, a source in Washington close to the opposition expressed doubts whether the Trump administration has laid enough groundwork to spur a wider mutiny in the ranks where many officers are suspected of benefiting from corruption and drug trafficking. Members of the South American country’s security forces fear they or their families could be targeted by Maduro if they defect, so the U.S. would need to offer them something that could outweigh those concerns, said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas think tank in Washington. “It depends on what they’re offering,” Farnsworth said. “Are there incentives built into these contacts that will at least cause people to question their loyalty to the regime?”

Read more …

A horse felled Troy.

• Venezuela’s Maduro Spurns US Aid, Rival Warns Military Not To Block It (R.)

Venezuela’s government on Friday said the United States should distribute humanitarian aid in Colombia where it is being stockpiled, while the opposition warned that blocking much-needed food and medicine could constitute crimes against humanity. A day after the aid convoy arrived in the border city of Cucuta, President Nicolas Maduro ridiculed the United States for offering small amounts of assistance while maintaining sanctions that block some $10 billion of offshore assets and revenue. Rival Juan Guaido, who is recognized by dozens of countries as Venezuela’s legitimate leader, warned military officers against blocking the arrival of aid amid spiraling disease and malnutrition brought on by a hyperinflationary collapse.

“Take all that humanitarian aid and give it to the people of Cucuta, where there is a lot of need,” Maduro said in a news conference. “This is a macabre game, you see? They squeeze us by the neck and then make us beg for crumbs.” “They offer us toilet paper, like (U.S. President) Donald Trump threw at the people of Puerto Rico,” he said at the conference, which experienced technical difficulties including a blackout and a microphone failure. He was referring to Trump’s improvised 2018 aid distribution in the U.S. territory following a hurricane, during which he threw rolls of paper towels.

Read more …

“Societies and economies are fundamentally emergent, non-linear, and self-organizing as they respond to the mandates of reality — which are not necessarily consistent with human wishes.”

• Dreams Die Hard (Kunstler)

America has been blowing green smoke up its own ass for years, promoting oxymorons such as “green skyscrapers” and “clean energy,” but the truth is we’re not going to run WalMart, Suburbia, DisneyWorld, and the interstate highway system on any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, recycled Fry-Max, and dark matter. We’re just running too much stuff at too great a scale for too many people. We’ve blown through the capital already and replaced it with IOUs that will never be honored, and we’re caught in an entropy trap of diminishing returns from all the work-arounds we’re desperately trying. For all that, there are actually some sound proposals in the mostly delusional matrix of the Green New Deal promoted by foxy front-person AOC.

• Revoke corporate personhood by amending our Constitution to make clear that corporations are not persons and money is not speech. Right on, I say, though they have not quite articulated the argument which is that corporations, unlike persons, have no vested allegiance to the public interest, but rather a legal obligation solely to shareholders and their boards-of-directors.
• Replace partisan oversight of elections with non-partisan election commissions. A no-brainer.
• Replace big money control of election campaigns with full public financing and free and equal access to the airwaves. Quite cheap and worth every penny.
• Break up the oversized banks that are “too big to fail.” And while you’re at it, resume enforcement of the anti-trust laws.
• Restore the Glass-Steagall separation of depository commercial banks from speculative investment banks. Duh….

There are two kinds of deadly narcissism at work in American culture these days: techno-narcissism — the belief that magical rescue remedies can save the status quo of comforts and conveniences — and organizational narcissism — the belief that any number of committees can lead a march of humanity into a future of rainbows and unicorns. Both of these ideas are artifacts of a fossil fuel turbo-charged economy that is coming to an end. Societies and economies are fundamentally emergent, non-linear, and self-organizing as they respond to the mandates of reality — which are not necessarily consistent with human wishes. Circumstances in the world change and sometimes, when the changes are profound enough, they provoke episodes of flux and disorder. A better index for our journey into the unknown frontier beyond modernity will not be what is “green” and “smart” but perhaps what is “sane” and “insane.”

Read more …

100 million sharks are killed globally each year.

We need to protect, and love, life in all its glory and beauty, because we are life. But we don’t see what connects us to all that we kill, we think we’re some separate entity.

There is no more flagrant failure in our education systems than this: they don’t teach us who we are.

• Wiped Out Before Our Eyes’ Hawaii Proposes Ban On Shark Killings (G.)

Sharks could soon become more numerous in Hawaii waters – and advocates say that’s a good thing. Lawmakers in Honolulu advanced a proposed ban on killing sharks in state waters on Wednesday, after receiving hundreds of calls and letters of support from around the country. The law, which would provide sweeping protection for any shark, rather than select species, could be the first of its kind in the United States. “These amazing animals are getting wiped out before our eyes, and people don’t even realize what they’re missing out on,” said Ocean Ramsey, a Hawaii-based shark conservationist, researcher and tour operator who has been instrumental in lobbying for the bill. Last month, a photo of Ramsey swimming with a 6-metre (20ft) great white shark off the coast of Oahu went viral.


Photograph: OneOceanDiving

Along with killing the animals, capturing or harming them would also incur fines and count as a misdemeanor offense. Sharks, Ramsey said, are deeply misunderstood. Their presence in the ocean is unlike any other animal’s, she noted. “Everything else in the ocean swims away from you, but you can have these incredible interactions with sharks because they’re apex predators and they’re not afraid of you.” The threats to Hawaii’s sharks are numerous, proponents of the bill argue. [..] shark fins can sometimes sell for as much as $500 a pound. Shark fin soup, a delicacy once favored by Chinese emperors, has become widely popular as a status symbol in modern China. As a result, nearly 100 million sharks are killed globally each year, and species are disappearing.

[..] Sharks are crucial to Hawaii’s marine ecosystem, and oceans worldwide. “They’re the ocean’s immune system,” Ramsey said. Multiple studies have linked shark populations to overall ocean health. They serve a critical purpose by picking off sick and injured marine animals and keeping smaller fish populations under control. When the shark population declines, large predatory fish can overproduce and decimate the populations of small plant-eating fish, which are crucial to keeping algae down and supporting reef systems.


Photograph: OneOceanDiving

Read more …

Debt Rattle July 25 2018

Jul 252018
 
 July 25, 2018  Posted by at 8:19 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , ,  7 Responses »


Ivan Aivazovsky Lake Maggiore 1892

 

• Trump Downbeat Ahead Of Trade Talks With EU (R.)
• Trump’s $12 Billion Aid For Farmers Risks Unintended Consequences (CNBC)
• ECB To Hold Steady Amid Heightened Risks Of A Trade War (CNBC)
• Alphabet May Become The Berkshire Hathaway Of The Internet Age (CNBC)
• Brexit: Raab ‘Sidelined’ As May Takes Control Of EU Negotiations (G.)
• “Cliff Edge” Brexit Threatens $34 Trillion of Derivative Contracts (DQ)
• UK Ministers Set To Be Given New Powers To Block Foreign Takeovers (G.)
• Offshore Owners Of British Property To Be Forced To Reveal Names (G.)
• The Greedy Little Nation That Sold Its Soul For House Prices (MB)
• When America Was Ruled by a King (Davis)
• Moon-Strzok No More, Lisa Page Spills the Beans (McGovern)
• Novichok Victim Found Substance Disguised As Perfume In Sealed Box (G.)
• US Intelligence Community as a Collapse Driver (Dmitry Orlov)
• Holiday Hunger Should Be The Shame Of This Government And It Isn’t (G.)

 

 

The EU doesn’t have a lot of room to move. It’s made of tariffs, barriers and subsidies.

• Trump Downbeat Ahead Of Trade Talks With EU (R.)

U.S. President Donald Trump took a pessimistic view of talks with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker set for Wednesday aimed at averting a trade war. In a tweet on Tuesday night, Trump said both the United States and the European Union should drop all tariffs, barriers and subsidies. “That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade!” Trump said. “Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!” he said. Trump has accused the EU of unfair trade practices and has threatened to raise tariffs on cars imported from the bloc.

European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom, who will accompany Juncker, said last week that the EU was preparing a list of U.S. products to hit if the United States imposed the tariffs. Juncker will not arrive in Washington with a specific trade offer, the commission said on Monday. “I do not wish to enter into a discussion about mandates, offers because there are no offers,” Commission spokesman Margaritis Schinas told a news conference in Brussels. White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow has said he expected Juncker to come with a “significant” trade offer.

Read more …

EU agriculture is built on enormous subsidies. No way they can let much of that go. Imagine the protests in France. Perhaps countries, but certainly continents should focud on producing their own food, not export it. But then the tiny Netherlands is the 2nd biggest tomato exporter in the world. That’s quite an applecart to upset.

• Trump’s $12 Billion Aid For Farmers Risks Unintended Consequences (CNBC)

According to the statement from the USDA, the administration “will take several actions to assist farmers in response to trade damage from unjustified retaliation.” The plan authorizes the agency to spend “up to $12 billion in programs, which is in line with the estimated $11 billion impact of the unjustified retaliatory tariffs on U.S. agricultural goods. These programs will assist agricultural producers to meet the costs of disrupted markets.” “Our farmers, our producers, they don’t want bailouts,” Simon Wilson, executive director of the North Dakota Trade Office, told CNBC’s “Closing Bell” on Tuesday. “They don’t want this help in the short term. They want long-term stability.”

Wilson added, “A lot of people have been hurt, so that’s a lot of money that’s going to have to be shared.” Payments under the largest part of the federal government’s relief plan would be targeted to producers of soybeans, sorghum, corn, wheat, cotton, dairy and hogs. Some experts have warned in the past that government aid or new subsidies could distort or disrupt markets and ultimately have negative consequences for the agriculture industry. That also includes the possibility it could lead to more retaliation on other agricultural exports.

In any event, Glauber said the program is likely to be taken as “producer support” and appears to be targeted toward a drop in the market price of certain commodities, meaning it could get counted against the U.S. commitments from the WTO. “We’ve run pretty low levels of [producer] support in recent years, but it will certainly raise a lot of eyebrows and will make people look at those calculations very, very carefully,” said Glauber. “It also will look at the way we formulate those programs very, very carefully.”

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With Brexit and Trump in its face, the ECB is pretty much stuck.

• ECB To Hold Steady Amid Heightened Risks Of A Trade War (CNBC)

After a surprisingly dovish meeting in June, the European Central Bank (ECB) is expected to strike a more balanced tone this week, given heightened uncertainties for the global economy. The focus will be on the ECB‘s assessments of these risks at its meeting Thursday, with investors concerned of the acute risk of a trade war escalation. “We expect Mario Draghi to aim for a ‘Goldilocks’ tone at the July 26 press conference — not too hawkish, not too dovish,” said Mark Wall, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank, in a research note. “The ECB only recently made a commitment to unchanged rates for the next year to lean against trade and volatility risks and avoid an unwarranted tightening of financial conditions.”

The ECB has committed itself to stop buying new bonds at the end of this year, but the onus clearly now is on the reinvestment of these purchases (as part of its crisis-era stimulus program) and its refined rate guidance. The euro zone’s central bank pledged to keep its key interest rate at minus 0.4 percent “at least through the summer of 2019” during its last meeting. The risks now are that the ECB is unwinding its monetary stimulus right at a time when the economy could head south. For now, its seems the ECB is convinced the region’s economy will remain resilient.

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Building empires.

• Alphabet May Become The Berkshire Hathaway Of The Internet Age (CNBC)

Alphabet CEO Larry Page has long admired Warren Buffett’s business acumen in creating the industrial and investment conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway. And now analysts and investors are noticing Alphabet’s investments in emerging disparate businesses are starting to bear fruit — including YouTube, autonomous cars and cloud computing — drawing comparison to Berkshire Hathaway’s success. The internet giant reported better-than-expected second-quarter earnings Monday, driving Alphabet shares to a new all-time high the following day. It generated adjusted earnings per share of $11.75 versus the Wall Street consensus of $9.59 for the quarter. Alphabet also posted a $1.06 billion gain in its equity investments for the time period.

“Our investments are driving great experiences for users, strong results for advertisers, and new business opportunities for Google and Alphabet,” said Ruth Porat, CFO of Alphabet and Google in the earnings press release Monday. As a result one well-known investor believes Alphabet has a shot of being the Berkshire Hathaway of tomorrow. “What I’m really talking about is the diversified nature of what [Alphabet is] building away from the ad platform, in much the same way as Berkshire reinvested the float from insurance premiums into other investments. I guess I am also talking in terms of longevity, not just size,” Josh Brown said in an email Tuesday. “This quarter witnessed a host of Google’s other investments throwing off profits. Larry and Sergey were very open about their intention to create something Berkshire-like when they first announced the new structure and Alphabet.”

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She can’t escape a second vote anymore. If you have 2.5 years, and you waste the first two, that’s what happens. It’s just the illusion of control.

• Brexit: Raab ‘Sidelined’ As May Takes Control Of EU Negotiations (G.)

Theresa May has taken back control of crucial negotiations with Brussels from her new Brexit secretary just hours after the government published its white paper on withdrawing from the EU. The prime minister announced she would now lead the crunch talks with the EU while Dominic Raab, who was appointed two weeks ago, would be left in charge of domestic preparations, no-deal planning and legislation. The move was swiftly characterised as a “sidelining” of the Brexit secretary by No 10’s Europe unit, led by May’s chief Brexit adviser, Olly Robbins, with the prime minister also taking officials from his department. In a written statement on the last sitting day of the Commons before the summer recess, May said: “I will lead the negotiations with the European Union, with the secretary of state for Exiting the European Union deputising on my behalf.

“Both of us will be supported by the Cabinet Office Europe Unit and with this in mind the Europe Unit will have overall responsibility for the preparation and conduct of the negotiations, drawing upon support from DExEU and other departments as required.” Robbins, appearing alongside Raab at the Commons’ Brexit committee, said: “The overall strategy for the conduct of these negotiations, she regards very much as her personal responsibility, now with the secretary of state very close at hand.” Raab described the changes as a “shifting of the Whitehall deckchairs” and said there would now be “one team, one chain of command” but pointed out that there would be “full assertion of ministerial accountability”.

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I’d swear it’s more. It’s dominoes.

• “Cliff Edge” Brexit Threatens $34 Trillion of Derivative Contracts (DQ)

A messy, no-deal Brexit could throw 48 million insurance contracts and £26 trillion ($34 trillion) of derivatives deals into confusion. Nausicaa Delfas, head of international strategy at the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), told delegates at a CityUK and Bloomberg event that there were “cliff-edge” risks due to uncertainty over the legality of financial contracts extending beyond the planned Brexit date, in March. The UK government has already passed regulations that would allow European banks and insurers to maintain their UK operations under current rules after Brexit. So far, the EU has refused to reciprocate, even on a temporary basis.

The EU has also ruled out extending passporting rights to UK financial institutions after Brexit. These rights allow UK-based institutions to sell financial products from the City to investors in the 27 other EU member states. Brussels has also turned down the UK government’s latest proposal for a system of “advanced equivalence” between British and EU financial services. If the EU continues to reject a temporary permissions regime and no cooperative Brexit deal is signed by the March 29 deadline, big doubts could be raised about the viability of certain derivatives contracts. And that could seriously disrupt an already highly volatile, deeply opaque, largely unregulated $600-trillion dollar industry.

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Cue Trump.

• UK Ministers Set To Be Given New Powers To Block Foreign Takeovers (G.)

Ministers will have the power to block foreign takeovers across all sectors of the British economy on national security grounds under new government proposals designed to protect some of the UK’s most important and technically advanced businesses. The business secretary, Greg Clark, wants to widen the scope of the current system, which is limited to large transactions and certain industries such as defence, to cover all UK firms including small businesses as he seeks to keep vital firms and technologies out of foreign ownership. The proposals, which will be subject to a 12-week consultation, will allow ministers to halt or unwind takeovers and even the smallest asset sales that could be deemed to jeopardise Britain’s national security.

Potential targets under the new rules are likely to be Chinese and Russian takeovers of defence-related industries. Technology firms, including cybersecurity businesses that already have links with the Ministry of Defence, or are viewed as crucial to the development of the UK’s financial and commercial defence systems, are also expected to top the list of ministers’ national security concerns. Clark allowed the £74m takeover of the handset maker Sepura by the Hytera Corporation of China last year, making it only the second review of a transaction on national security grounds in 18 months, after the MoD raised concerns this month over the sale of Northern Aerospace to a Chinese buyer. The Competition and Markets Authority later cleared the Northern Aerospace transaction, by which time it had lapsed.

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Why would you want faceless foreigners owning your real estate?

• Offshore Owners Of British Property To Be Forced To Reveal Names (G.)

Offshore owners of British property will be forced to reveal their true identities or face jail sentences and unlimited fines under draft laws that aim to end the UK’s reputation as a high-risk jurisdiction for money laundering. The legislation follows years of scandals involving the acquisition of high-value UK property by offshore companies, and concerns that a lack of regulation was allowing corrupt money into the housing market. The National Crime Agency said three years ago that overseas criminal gangs were using British property transactions to launder billions of pounds in corrupt funds. Parliament’s foreign affairs committee went further earlier this year, saying that corrupt Russian funds laundered through the UK, including via property, posed a threat to national security.

Under the new legislation, overseas companies that own UK properties will be required to identify their true owners on a publicly available register. The government said the register was part of a wider crackdown on money laundering in the property sector, and would make it easier for law enforcers to seize criminal assets. The anonymous ownership of property via offshore companies is perfectly legal, but it has also been a subject of concern for housing campaigners concerned about an influx of foreign money forcing up house prices.

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If it’s any consolation: you’re not alone.

• The Greedy Little Nation That Sold Its Soul For House Prices (MB)

There was a time when Australia’s housing bubble was not much more than a curiosity. Contained mostly to Sydney it seemed it would pass with a little pop and be forgotten. Then there was a time when the bubble went national. And suddenly the little pop was going to be a big pop so monetary and fiscal policy began to distort in support of it. Next there was a time when moral hazard became so great that the bubble grew to engulf all policy and media, marginalising an entire generation from home ownership. Politicians routinely lied to cover the collapse in evidence based policy-making.

Finally, we come to today. When notions of managing the macro-economic levers of an economy now boil down to just one thing: • low interest rates to prevent the housing bubble bursting; • fiscal repair to prevent the bubble bursting, and • mass immigration to prevent the bubble bursting even though it is crushing living standards and gutting wages. [..] It’s all so bizarre. All we need to do is cut immigration and let house prices fall. There’ll be a period of adjustment while wages and the currency correct but it won’t be too bad. We’ll still be on the doorstep of Asia. The students and tourists will still come, in greater numbers than ever as we get cheaper, but they’ll also go home not pressuring living standards.

Broader tradables (40% of the economy) will boom. Commodity income will surge, lifting the Budget. Our maginalised youth will have much greater opportunities to advance their global opportunities as Dutch Disease ends. Incomes will ultimately be much more sustainable. Then we can all move on with a much healthier economy, polity, society and strategic outlook. The alternative is to sell our freedom to China, our standards of living to a few rich developers, our politics to carpet baggers and our society to fractious class wars. Just for higher house prices. If a more ignominious fate awaited any nation in history then I’m not aware of it.

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Did the US go down with Elvis? And in the same way?

• When America Was Ruled by a King (Davis)

America emerged out of darkness and light – a proto-nation clouded by the genocide of native Americans and the enslavement of transshipped Africans but brilliantly shot through with shafts of luminescence – the liberal ideals of European philosophers such as Locke and Hume.The alternate red and white stripes of its flag have thus come to echo a nation born in the blood of its innocent victims yet ennobled, in parallel, by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Yet even after its ideals were enshrined in The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the country continued to countenance slavery, the trading of domestic, purpose-bred Africans and the brutal killing of native peoples and their vibrant communities.

Today, the historic and contemporary horrors of the American nation are ground together with its liberal principles (in some mythic bedrock mortar) to produce a culture that proclaims its goodness to its people and to the world, yet is visibly marbled with the evils of state violence against refugees and minorities, the economic oppression of a population paradoxically made comatose through over-consumption and the global havoc wreaked by its Imperial killing machine. It is this grand chiaroscuro that Eugene Jarecki explores in The King, 2018, his new documentary on the life, death and after-life of Elvis Presley, now in select release following its acclaimed debuts at the film festivals in Sundance and Cannes.

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The FBI as a Shakespearean comedy.

• Moon-Strzok No More, Lisa Page Spills the Beans (McGovern)

Former FBI attorney Lisa Page has reportedly told a joint committee of the House of Representatives that when FBI counterintelligence official Peter Strzok texted her on May 19, 2017 saying there was “no big there there,” he meant there was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. It was clearly a bad-luck day for Strzok, when on Friday the 13th this month Page gave her explanation of the text to the House Judiciary and Oversight/Government Reform Committees and in effect threw her lover, Strzok, under the bus. Strzok’s apparent admission to Page about there being “no big there there” was reported on Friday by John Solomon in the Opinion section of The Hill based on multiple sources who he said were present during Page’s closed door interview.

Strzok’s text did not come out of the blue. For the previous ten months he and his FBI subordinates had been trying every-which-way to ferret out some “there” — preferably a big “there” — but had failed miserably. If Solomon’s sources are accurate, it is appearing more and more likely that there was nothing left for them to do but to make it up out of whole cloth, with the baton then passed to special counsel Robert Mueller. The “no there there” text came just two days after former FBI Director James Comey succeeded in getting his friend Mueller appointed to investigate the alleged collusion that Strzok was all but certain wasn’t there.

Robert Parry, the late founder and editor of Consortium News whom Solomon described to me last year as his model for journalistic courage and professionalism, was already able to discern as early as March 2017 the outlines of what is now Deep State-gate, and, typically, was the first to dare report on its implications. Parry’s article, written two and a half months before Strzok texted the self-incriminating comment to Page on there being “no big there there,” is a case study in professional journalism. His very first sentence entirely anticipated Strzok’s text: “The hysteria over ‘Russia-gate’ continues to grow … but at its core there may be no there there.”

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And entire article from the Guardian without blaming Russia. Wow. Story still makes little sense. Why does this guy get to talk, when the Skripals are still nowhere to be found?

• Novichok Victim Found Substance Disguised As Perfume In Sealed Box (G.)

The British man poisoned with the nerve agent novichok has claimed the substance that killed his girlfriend and left him critically ill came in a bottle disguised as a legitimate perfume in a sealed box. Charlie Rowley claimed his partner, mother-of-three Dawn Sturgess, fell ill within 15 minutes of spraying the bottle, which he said he had found, on to her wrists at his home in Amesbury, Wiltshire. In his first interview since he was discharged from hospital, Rowley told ITV News: “I do have a memory of her spraying it on her wrists and rubbing them together. “I guess that’s how she applied it and became ill.

I guess how I got in contact with it is when I put the spray part to the bottle … I ended up tipping some on my hands but I washed it off under the tap. “It was an oily substance and I smelled it and it didn’t smell of perfume. It felt oily. I washed it off and I didn’t think anything of it. It all happened so quick. “Within 15 minutes, Dawn said she had a headache. She asked me if I had any headache tablets. In that time she said she felt peculiar and needed to lie down in the bath. I went into the bathroom and found her in the bath, fully clothed, in a very ill state.”

Counter-terrorism detectives are working on the theory that the poisoning of Rowley and Sturgess at the end of last month is directly linked to the poisoning of the Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury in March. Experts from the top secret research facility at Porton Down in Wiltshire are trying to establish if the novichok was from the same batch. But if Rowley is correct about the perfume bottle being boxed and sealed, it may undermine the line of inquiry that the novichok that he and Sturgess came into contact with had been discarded by the attackers of the Skripals. It also opens up the possibility that there may yet be more novichok that has not been found in Wiltshire.

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“Intelligence”. Always good to see Dmitry.

• US Intelligence Community as a Collapse Driver (Dmitry Orlov)

In today’s United States, the term “espionage” doesn’t get too much use outside of some specific contexts. There is still sporadic talk of industrial espionage, but with regard to Americans’ own efforts to understand the world beyond their borders, they prefer the term “intelligence.” This may be an intelligent choice, or not, depending on how you look at things. First of all, US “intelligence” is only vaguely related to the game of espionage as it has been traditionally played, and as it is still being played by countries such as Russia and China. Espionage involves collecting and validating strategically vital information and conveying it to just the pertinent decision-makers on your side while keeping the fact that you are collecting and validating it hidden from everyone else.

In eras past, a spy, if discovered, would try to bite down on a cyanide capsule; these days torture is considered ungentlemanly, and spies that get caught patiently wait to be exchanged in a spy swap. An unwritten, commonsense rule about spy swaps is that they are done quietly and that those released are never interfered with again because doing so would complicate negotiating future spy swaps. In recent years, the US intelligence agencies have decided that torturing prisoners is a good idea, but they have mostly been torturing innocent bystanders, not professional spies, sometimes forcing them to invent things, such as “Al Qaeda.” There was no such thing before US intelligence popularized it as a brand among Islamic terrorists.

Most recently, British “special services,” which are a sort of Mini-Me to the to the Dr. Evil that is the US intelligence apparatus, saw it fit to interfere with one of their own spies, Sergei Skripal, a double agent whom they sprung from a Russian jail in a spy swap. They poisoned him using an exotic chemical and then tried to pin the blame on Russia based on no evidence. There are unlikely to be any more British spy swaps with Russia, and British spies working in Russia should probably be issued good old-fashioned cyanide capsules (since that supposedly super-powerful Novichok stuff the British keep at their “secret” lab in Porton Down doesn’t work right and is only fatal 20% of the time).

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A country in downfall.

• Holiday Hunger Should Be The Shame Of This Government And It Isn’t (G.)

As the summer holidays begin, many families look forward to breaks away from home, in the UK and abroad. Yet for thousands of families, the six-week school break is characterised not by play schemes and day trips in the sun, but acute financial stress, hunger and malnourishment, due to the absence of free school meals for children on low incomes that costs a family £30-£40 a week. With three million children at risk of hunger during the school holidays, the Trussell Trust has warned that food bank use spikes each summer. And last year, 593 organisations running holiday clubs across the UK provided more than 190,000 meals to over 22,000 school-aged children.

Feeding Britain, the charity set up by two Labour MPs, Emma Lewell-Buck and Frank Field, expects to provide meals for 27,000 children in 79 clubs across England this summer. In pilots in 2017, it provided a total of 43,314 meals in holiday fun clubs across eight areas, including Birkenhead, South Shields and Cornwall, in the summer holidays and October half term. Feeding Britain works with existing local charities, community groups, councils and others in the community providing funding and toolkits on how to run and roll out pilots, and creates networks for practical support. The clubs run in community centres, church halls, schools, children’s centres, libraries and parks, and they host games and activities for children, alongside breakfast, lunches, and lessons about food and nutrition for the young attendees.

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Aid for Sex

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


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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

UN Staff Responsible For 60,000 Rapes In A Decade

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

More Andrew McLeod, via the Daily Mail:

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

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

From the same article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Automatic Earth Still Helps Greeks and Refugees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Debt Rattle January 15 2017

Jan 152017
 
 January 15, 2017  Posted by at 11:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  Comments Off on Debt Rattle January 15 2017


John Collier Street Corner, Monday after Pearl Harbor, San Francisco 1941

• Trump Team Denies Report Of Meeting With Putin In Iceland (Fox)
• Trump is Hand Grenade Thrown by American Working Class Against the System (Sp.)
• Americans Overwhelmingly Support Bernie Sanders’ Economic Policies (Salon)
• Tulsi Gabbard Has a Bill to Stop the US Arming ISIS (RI)
• We Are Getting Worried About Paul Krugman (ZH)
• RealVision’s 15 “Killer Charts” For Q1 2017 (ZH)
• Aid In Reverse: How Poor Countries Develop Rich Countries (G.)
• More Than 100 Refugees Drown As Boat Sinks In Mediterranean (Ind.)

 

 

Something will happen though. And it should.

• Trump Team Denies Report Of Meeting With Putin In Iceland (Fox)

President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming press secretary Sean Spicer denied a report from the Sunday Times on Saturday that said Trump was seeking to have a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Iceland. The Sunday Times reported that Trump aides told British officials that Trump plans to meet with Putin on his first foreign trip, possibly in Reykjavik. The paper, citing unidentified sources, reported that Trump plans to begin working out a deal to limit nuclear weapons and that Moscow agreed to the meeting. According to the newspaper, Trump sought to emulate former President Ronald Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 that took place in the Icelandic capital. The two met in an effort to work on a major nuclear disbarment treaty at the height of the Cold War. Spicer lashed out at the report on Twitter, calling it “100% false.”

Read more …

When left became right.

• Trump is Hand Grenade Thrown by American Working Class Against the System (Sp.)

The last year has taught us, with Brexit, the US elections, growing anti-EU sentiment on the continent of Europe, that ignoring national interests, which are more and more often expressed in terms of national culture and identity, is not possible anymore. Will this translate through into the reconstruction of economic protectionism? Professor Steve Keen, from the University of Kingston, an economist and an author answers this question. Are identity and culture the new important subjects in politics? Professor Keen gives an explanatory answer. To him, a progressive form of identity and gender politics and socialist politics have been bedfellows for the past 40 years.

One of the clearest examples is in France, he says, where you have Hollande; a socialist leader imposing austerity whilst talking about progressive attitudes to identity politics. Progressive identity politics has been tainted with the brush of austerity politics imposed by the European Union. The socialists have been sunk by it, with a resurgent Marine Le Pen benefiting from the support of middle aged white farmers, and white workers in America supporting Trump. It was a massive mistake, Professor Keen says, for the ‘left’ to align itself with neoliberal economics and failed economic policies which are now falling apart. The centre left, Professor Keen continues, which has been the mainstream socialist thought for some time are basically saying that we have to get into power, and then make capitalism work better.

This is a complete travesty, because success was only brought about by leveraging unsuccessful economies. They ended up deregulating the financial sector, and the next thing they know, economies come crashing down. There is identification of failed social policy with the failed neoliberal policy. The main sufferers have been what is used to be called the industrial workers, they are now saying that if you can’t protect us, we are going across to the people who might be able to. They might be ugly but they might allow us to throw a political hand grenade into the system to wake up those Americans who have been neglected ideologically by the left and also because they have actually lost their jobs to benefit people in China, as Trump has been arguing.

Read more …

Title continues: So how’d we end up here? Interesting question. What happened? Hillary happened.

• Americans Overwhelmingly Support Bernie Sanders’ Economic Policies (Salon)

During a CNN town hall held by Sen. Bernie Sanders last Monday, the Vermont senator and progressive icon tried to drive home a point that he has frequently made in the past: There is widespread support for most of the economic policies that he ran on, even if they were often portrayed as radical and divisive by the media. “The overwhelming majority of the American people – including many people who voted for Mr. Trump – support the ideas that we’re talking about,” insisted Sanders. “On many economic issues you would be surprised at how many Americans hold the same views. Very few people believe what the Republican leadership believes now: tax breaks for billionaires and cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.”

Public polling tends to support his claim. A Gallup survey from last May, for example, revealed that a majority of Americans (58%) support the idea of replacing the Affordable Care Act with a federally funded health care system (including four in 10 Republicans!), while only 22% of Americans say they want Obamacare repealed and don’t want to replace it with a single-payer system. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll from last year had similar results: Almost two-thirds of Americans (64%) had a positive reaction to “Medicare-for-all,” while only a small minority (13%) supported repealing the ACA and replacing it with a Republican alternative. These are surprising numbers when you consider how the Sanders campaign’s “Medicare-for-all” plan was written off by critics as being too extreme.

On other issues, a similar story presents itself. Public Policy Polling (PPP) has found that the vast majority (88%) of voters in Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – four crucial swing states, three of which went to Trump this fall – oppose cutting Social Security benefits, while a majority (68%) oppose privatizing Social Security. Similarly, 67% of Americans support requiring high-income earners to pay the payroll tax for all of their income (the cap is currently $118,500), according to a Gallup poll. America’s two other major social programs, Medicare and Medicaid, are also widely supported by Americans, and the vast majority oppose any spending cuts to either. In fact, more Americans support cutting the national defense budget than Medicare or Medicaid. It goes on and on. A majority of Americans, 61%, believe that upper-income earners pay too little in taxes.

A majority of 64% believe that corporations don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Significant majorities believe that wealth distribution is unfair in America, support raising the minimum wage (though perhaps not as high as Sanders would like), and say they are worried about climate change. So a consistent majority of Americans would seem to agree almost across the board with a self-proclaimed democratic socialist and object to the reactionary agenda of congressional Republicans. How, then, did we end up with a Republican-controlled Congress that is dead set on repealing the ACA without a viable replacement (let alone a single-payer type of system supported by the majority); cutting and possibly privatizing Medicare, Social Security and Medicaid; slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans; and ignoring climate change?

Read more …

Go Tulsi.

• Tulsi Gabbard Has a Bill to Stop the US Arming ISIS (RI)

FOX’s Tucker Carlson scored another great interview when he spoke to Hawaii’s congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. Rep. Gabbard talked about her meeting with President-elect Trump some weeks ago to discuss the danger of further neocon escalation of the war in Syria. She has also recently introduced a bill in congress aimed at preventing the US from funding terrorist groups like ISIS in the future. The bill is brilliantly named the “Stop Funding Terrorists Act.” Seems guaranteed to pass – who could possibly justify voting against it to their constituents? Having this on the books would be a useful tool to stop any further terror-funding operations. Something to watch.

Read more …

Too good to skip.

• We Are Getting Worried About Paul Krugman (ZH)

When a delicate snowflake is suddenly faced with a perceived reality so devastating as to be an existential crisis, the mind's reaction to dealing with this cognitive dissonance can be disabling for some. Certainly for The New York Times' flip-flopping, hate-mongering, fact-twisting, Keynesian poster-boy Paul Krugman it appears coping with "no" is not going well and his tirade last night in Twitter has us gravely concerned for his mental stability, which is ironic given how he began yesterday…

But that was followed quickly by a six-tweet-rant nothing short of what we would expect from a dejected five-year-old who just got denied another scoop of ice cream…

Krugman once again blames the ignorance of the deplorable masses (who just don't get what a "fraudster" Trump is) in shunning him and his "know-it-alls", but he has been heading down this hill of manic-depressive lashing out for weeks now having recently suggested Trump will unleash a 9/11-style attack to legitimize his presidency.

Is he hoping to maintain a groundswell of "well, if he is not hitler… he must be worse" thoughts among those so easily led? Still, coming from a man who has prognosticated alien invasions as a global economic growth engine, we are not sure if he is mental situation is improving or deteriorating. We wish him well.

Read more …

I picked 3.

• RealVision’s 15 “Killer Charts” For Q1 2017 (ZH)

Ranging from the most expensive stock market ever to the dis-similarity in the economic situations facing Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan; and from the excess liquidity driving the price oil to the extraordinarily dangerous growth of credit (debt) relative to GDP, Raoul Pal’s Real Vision has expanded its exceptional services into investment research by publishing the “killer charts” that every market participant should comprehend for the first quarter of 2017…

 

 

Read more …

And there are people surprised to see this?! How then do they think we got so rich? Simple: we rape and pillage.

• Aid In Reverse: How Poor Countries Develop Rich Countries (G.)

We have long been told a compelling story about the relationship between rich countries and poor countries. The story holds that the rich nations of the OECD give generously of their wealth to the poorer nations of the global south, to help them eradicate poverty and push them up the development ladder. Yes, during colonialism western powers may have enriched themselves by extracting resources and slave labour from their colonies – but that’s all in the past. These days, they give more than $125bn (£102bn) in aid each year – solid evidence of their benevolent goodwill. This story is so widely propagated by the aid industry and the governments of the rich world that we have come to take it for granted. But it may not be as simple as it appears.

The US-based Global Financial Integrity (GFI) and the Centre for Applied Research at the Norwegian School of Economics recently published some fascinating data. They tallied up all of the financial resources that get transferred between rich countries and poor countries each year: not just aid, foreign investment and trade flows (as previous studies have done) but also non-financial transfers such as debt cancellation, unrequited transfers like workers’ remittances, and unrecorded capital flight (more of this later). As far as I am aware, it is the most comprehensive assessment of resource transfers ever undertaken. What they discovered is that the flow of money from rich countries to poor countries pales in comparison to the flow that runs in the other direction.

In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States.

Read more …

Checked your account at the karma bank lately?

• More Than 100 Refugees Drown As Boat Sinks In Mediterranean (Ind.)

More than 100 refugees have drowned after a boat sank in rough conditions in the Mediterranean Sea as the crisis shows no sign of slowing. The Italian Navy was searching for survivors from the vessel, which was believed to be carrying up to 110 people. Only four survivors were pulled from the water, with at least eight bodies found so far. Flavio Di Giacomo, from the International Organisation for Migration, told The Independent around 106 people were thought to have died and described the conditions at sea as “extremely bad”. The boat went down in waters between Libya and Italy, which has become the deadliest sea crossing in the world since the start of the refugee crisis.It claimed the vast majority of more than 5,000 lives lost in treacherous boat journeys to Europe in 2016, the deadliest year on record, with people drowning or being crushed or suffocated in overcrowded smugglers’ boats.

Saturday’s disaster was the worst single incident so far this year, which has already seen at least 122 deaths at sea. Rescue workers warn that the crisis is showing no sign of slowing in the Central Mediterranean, which has become the main route since the EU-Turkey deal was implemented in March to reduce comparatively shorter and safer crossings over the Aegean Sea. At least 550 refugees were rescued on Friday alone off the coast of Libya, where continuing conflict and lawlessness since the British-backed defeat of Muammar Gaddafi has allowed the smuggling and exploitation of migrants to thrive. Two people were found dead at the bottom of one of the four boats saved and the bodies of four other migrants were found off the coast of Spain. Several asylum seekers have also died in the extreme weather conditions gripping much of Europe in recent weeks.

More than 5,000 refugees were drowned, suffocated or crushed while attempting to cross the Mediterranean and Aegean seas in 2016, making it the deadliest year on record. Many deaths are thought to go unrecorded, with bodies either disappearing or washing up on the shores of Libya, where authorities do not routinely release casualty figures. Some boats are sighted by Italian authorities but disappear before they can be reached by rescue ships. The Unravelling the Mediterranean Migration Crisis (Medmig) project partly blamed Britain and EU nations for rocketing death rates, concluding that the refusal to open up legal routes for those seeking safety in Europe has increased demand for people smuggling on ever more dangerous routes.

Read more …

The Other Human Needs Your Help This Christmas

Nov 292016
 
 November 29, 2016  Posted by at 7:17 pm Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Andrea Bonetti Konstantinos Polychronopoulos 2015

 

To anyone who reads this, please send it to as many of your friends and family and others as you can. Tweet and retweet, post and share on Facebook, do whatever you can to make Christmas a better time and place for the poorest Greeks and refugees. And, of course, please donate!

 

 

It’s 4 weeks before Christmas and it’s time. Time for me to go back to the basics, the streets, the people of Athens – the people of Greece as a whole. Back to my friends at the O Allos Anthropos (The Other Human) Social Kitchen who by now serve 5,000 meals a day every day spread over a dozen+ locations on -less than- a shoestring, to the poorest Greeks and to refugees. To my dear friend Konstantinos Polychronopoulos, the little engine that could, and does, drive the entire ‘intervention’.

It’s time also to announce a Christmas/New Year’s fund raiser for these people here at the Automatic Earth, to coincide with our usual annual fundraiser for the Automatic Earth itself. As always, please donate through the Automatic Earth’s Paypal widget at the top left hand side of our pages. If you don’t fancy Paypal, there’s an address for checks and money orders on our Store and Donations page.

Donations that end in $0.99 or $0.37 all go straight to O Allos Anthropos. In fact, I will deliver them in person, something that is necessary because of continuing capital controls in Greece. And no, don’t worry, I don’t pay my travel and stay in Athens from the donations for O Allos Anthropos. Every donated penny goes where it belongs. Guaranteed.

 

I never intended to get involved in aid, I have as many reservations about institutionalized aid as so many people tell me they have. All I wanted to do initially was to donate a few dollars when I first visited Greece in June 2015. But things have taken off from there, both because of Automatic Earth readers’ generosity (over $30,000!) , and because I found what I have come to regard as the perfect vehicle to deliver aid.

O Allos Anthropos is that vehicle, because it does not fit the mold the ‘aid industry’ has built. The flipside of this is that it has a hard time getting funded. It’s mighty ironic that the one ‘organization’ that is by far the most efficient in delivering aid, should also be the one that has by far the hardest time getting support to do that.

‘The Other Human’ Social Kitchen does not rely on government contacts and contracts, as the established aid industry does. It also doesn’t pay hefty salaries (no salaries at all) or have huge overhead. It’s a loosely organized group of dedicated poor Greeks, often homeless themselves, caring for and feeding other poor Greeks and refugees, helping where they can as far as the funding allows.

It’s the difference between top down and bottom up. And yes, it’s crazy that such a difference should exist even in delivering basic needs to the most needy among us, but it’s there.

 


From Human-The Movie, Yann Arthus-Bertrand

 

There is a list of about a dozen articles with links at the bottom of this page that I’ve written about my visits to Athens over the past 15 months. And there are 4 new videos of Konstantinos and the O Allos Anthropos ‘movement’ inserted in the article. Do watch them, together they paint a great picture.

But first, please allow me to explain why I support the Greek people the way I do. There are several reasons.

 

Number one is the state of the Greek economy. The effects of austerity policies on Greek society were front page news a year and a half ago, but since then, the world has largely left the country alone (15 minutes of fame only) while things have gotten worse fast, and an additional issue, that of the refugees, was added.

The treatment of Greece by its creditors continues to be scandalous, the EU, ECB and IMF behave like a nest of boa constrictors. In a nutshell, it has intentionally been made impossible for the Greek economy to recover. No matter what else you may read, it is a cruel joke to even suggest that an economy and society in which 25% of adults, and over 50% of young people, have been unemployed for years on end, could ‘recover’. If you read headlines like ‘Greece Edges Out Of Recession’, you’re being played.

Add to the mix that consumer spending makes up some 60% of GDP in Greece, but many of those who do have jobs work for €100-€400 a month, and pensions have been cut to less than €700 for 60% of pensioners (basic pension is about €380), and 52% of households -must- live off pensions of elderly family members because most unemployed get nothing. 7 out of 10 jobless are long time unemployed, and get nada. Close to half of pensioners live below the poverty line. Never ending tax raises have put the cost of living beyond reach for millions.

Moreover, tens of thousands of the best educated young Greeks (and 1000 doctors a year) have left the country because there are no jobs and no prospects. The education system was once as highly touted globally as the health care system, but both have been gutted so dramatically now it’s hard to see how either could ever be rebuilt. 15 months ago I donated some money to social clinics, now I receive long and detailed lists of medicine that is simply no longer available. With a cry for help.

Under these circumstances, spending can only go down, and that means GDP growth is mathematically impossible. Nor has a bottom been reached; the situation will deteriorate until conditions allow for spending to rise, and no such thing is in sight. The Troika parties keep hammering on more ‘reforms’ -advertized as an investment in the future-, which invariably make matters worse, while they keep quarreling about, and delaying, debt relief. Boa constrictor. Slow strangulation. In the latest talks, the creditors are demanding additional austerity measures for 2019-2020… That is the reality for Greece.

 


From Destination: Utopia

 

Number two is the refugee situation. When I first got to Athens, refugees were not yet a major concern, the Greeks themselves were. Much has changed since then. After the initial large wave, most of which ended up in Germany and other countries, borders were shut and Greece was left to deal with those who remained. Promises to ‘fairly’ resettle refugees in the rest of the EU were largely ignored. There are presently about 60,000 refugees in Greece, and they’re stuck where they don’t want to be, in a country that doesn’t have the means to take care of them.

Brussels refuses for Greece to move the refugees stuck in camps on the islands, to the mainland, for fear they will try and travel north. Still, 60,000 should never be the problem that it is. However, the EU never sent the personnel it once promised to deal with asylum applications. Greek Immigration Minister Mouzalas said last week: “We had an agreement for 400 staffers. Just 35 have arrived. We had a new agreement for another 100 and are still waiting..”. Of course, when the applications are delayed, so is the need for Brussels to resettle the refugees. Convenient when there are elections coming in Holland, France and Germany.

But it is Greece that gets the blame for this; Athens should move faster, is the word. And because it doesn’t, Brussels doesn’t send the humanitarian funds it makes available, to the Greek government; it sends them to international NGOs instead. Which leads us to:

 


From Chris Gal

 

Number three is the reality of humanitarian aid. First, let me say I don’t mean to sound -overly- negative about this. But at the same time I feel obliged to explain to you why I’m asking for your support despite the aid that’s already flowing through ‘official’ channels. To put it mildly: things don’t work the way they could. There is aid that reaches the target groups, and there are many well-intentioned people involved, but the overall efficiency with which that happens leaves much to be desired.

Many people are reluctant to donate to large (i)NGOs because they are suspicious of their culture(s). I am not an expert on this, but from what I have heard and seen over the past while, that suspicion does not look so crazy. What it comes down to is that humanitarian aid has become an industry. In the Greek situation, this means that the about €300 million (reported numbers vary) dispersed by the EU so far (€700 over 3 years) to assist Greece and Italy with their refugee influx, has by and large been divided over some 150 NGOs and other aid organizations.

But the stories about underfed, poorly housed and overall miserable refugees and migrants keep rolling in. And more often than not, the Greek government gets the blame. However, if €300 million is not enough for NGOs and aid organizations to make sure 60,000 are properly fed and in general taken care of, what is?

What I had heard and observed on the ground was confirmed in September – in one of these ‘glad it’s not just me’ moments – by a series in the Guardian called Secret Aid Worker. An anonymous aid worker with experience in multiple countries wrote this:

Secret Aid Worker: Greece Has Exposed The Aid Community’s Failures

At the time of writing, the number of refugees in Greece is approximately 60,000. The problem is not overwhelming. This time we are in an EU country. I feel safe wherever I am – this means I can conduct a visit to monitor the impact of a programme or ensure I am consulting refugees about what they want. But I don’t, because it is something we have talked about but not done for many years, and there is little pressure to change.

The disconnect between the sector’s standards and the reality on the ground is more stark here than in any other mission I’ve been involved in. We have historically been unaccountable, failing to sufficiently consult and engage affected communities. In Greece we are continuing to operate in the same ways as before, but without the traditional excuses to rely on.

When we have enabling infrastructure, a socio-political context that is easy to operate in, access to Wi-Fi, technology and adequate funds, and yet are failing to meet the refugees’ basic needs (even for something as simple as safe accommodation), reduce serious threats (such as the prevalence of sexual violence), or to be accountable or innovative, it suggests we are disinterested or incompetent. Perhaps both.

In Greece the aid community is being exposed. Our exposure is further compounded when we are unfavourably compared to organised and efficient groups of volunteers who work with less and achieve more. In comparison INGOs and the UNHCR seem money-orientated, bloated, bureaucratic and inefficient.

Across Greece there are volunteers working both independently and as organised groups, meeting needs and filling gaps. They take over abandoned buildings to ensure refugees have somewhere to sleep, provide additional nutrition to pregnant and breastfeeding women, organise and manage informal education programmes, including setting up schools inside camps.

All of this while INGO staff sip their cappuccinos in countless coordination meetings – for cash distribution, protection, water, sanitation and hygiene, food distribution and child-protection. Often to avoid engaging meaningfully in the discussions, we furiously take notes. If any response has called into question whether the humanitarian sector is still fit for purpose, it’s the response to the refugee crisis in Greece.

A good example of this is that it was O Allos Anthropos that was asked last year by the lady who ran the Moria refugee facilities on Lesbos, to run the food supply (the kitchen still operates). The NGOs and their millions in funding failed to do it. Konstantinos did, after he organized food donations by the people living on the island, and after I gave him some of your donations, so he could pay for transport etc. needed to make it possible.

O Allos Anthropos doesn’t fit the model developed by the industry that aid has become. In many aspects, that’s a good thing. But it also means it’s a daily struggle to do even the most basic good. And yes, we need to try and change that. But breaking the aid industry mold will not be easy. And in the meantime, the need will continue to be there, and it will keep growing, and Konstantinos will keep trying to fill it.

 


From Solidarity Networks 1: the mini doc series

 

One thing that struck me about the aid industry was reading that British politician David Milliband makes $600,000 a year as head of IRC, the International Refugee Committee. And when he makes that kind of money, so do others involved in the ‘industry’.

And then there are people like Konstantinos, who doesn’t make a penny, who has devoted his entire life to helping people in need, and the contrast is so big it borders on insane. Of course Konstantinos is not alone in this; there are many people who work to aid others without asking for anything in return.

Konstantinos doesn’t want to try and fit O Allos Anthropos into the established -international- aid mold. He doesn’t want to fill out paperwork on a constant basis, and rely on permissions, approval or validation from governments and other ‘high-up’ bodies. He wants by the people for the people. But he has come to realize since we met that if he wants to address the ever growing demands made on him, he can’t do it with no money at all.

Recently, he was invited, and traveled to Perugia, Italy, where people want to start their own version of O Allos Anthropos. This week, he is in Barcelona, where the same questions have been asked. And unless he starts saying No to ever more people, he will need funding.

I mentioned a long list of drugs and medical paraphernalia that social pharmacies are asking him for help in acquiring. People die in Greece, they suffer pain, they tumble into misery, from afflictions that just a few years ago were easy to treat. That’s how bad things have gotten. Earlier this year, Konstantinos told me he had an idea to set up a service to deliver food and drugs to old people in villages in the Greek countryside, in the mountains, remote villages that today often house only older people because the young have all left. A great idea, but how is he going to pay for it?

On December 4, O Allos Anthropos will have a party to celebrate its 5th anniversary, and 2 million meals served. By far most of those were served after the Automatic Earth got involved and your donations made it possible to expand the Social Kitchen to the 17 or so locations across the country, and the islands, where aid is delivered under the O Allos Anthropos banner.

In the first few years, it all operated by people donating food directly. But food donations have fallen by 50% or more this year, because ever fewer Greeks can afford to donate. It is time for the rest of the world to step in. And that doesn’t have to cost millions. The $30,000 you have donated over the past 15 months have achieved miracles already.

In an ideal scenario, I would like to be able to collect $50,000 a year for Konstantinos to do his work. More than $100,000 would not be needed, unless things take a dramatic turn for the worse. Talking of which, any of you who work in the medical field and would like to help alleviate the medicine shortages, drop me a line at Contact • at • TheAutomaticEarth • com, and I’ll tell you what’s most needed.

 

Please, those of you who have been involved on location or otherwise in delivering aid, understand that I don’t mean to insult you. Most of you come with the best intentions, and many do great work, often against the grain. But I think the account of the Secret Aid Worker above cannot sound entirely unfamiliar to you. So much goes wrong that it must be plain for most of you to see.

And it’s perhaps good to wonder whether international volunteers are the best option to deliver aid in countries where locals are available, and willing, to do the same work. The difference is one gets funding and the other does not. Maybe that, more than anything, should change.

But for now, because it’ll soon be Christmas and because we want to give Konstantinos and his people a wonderful Yuletide and a positive start to the new year, please help us by donating generously.

Because whatever economic and/or political and/or election issues you may have gotten worked up about lately, in the end, and certainly at Christmas time, it is about people. Indeed, it is about helping strangers.

 

 

For donations to Kostantinos and O Allos Anthropos, the Automatic Earth has a Paypal widget on our front page, top left hand corner. On our Sales and Donations page, there is an address to send money orders and checks if you don’t like Paypal. Our Bitcoin address is 1HYLLUR2JFs24X1zTS4XbNJidGo2XNHiTT. For other forms of payment, drop us a line at Contact • at • TheAutomaticEarth • com.

To tell donations for Kostantinos apart from those for the Automatic Earth (which badly needs them too!), any amounts that come in ending in either $0.99 or $0.37, will go to O Allos Anthropos.

Please give generously.

 

 

I made a list of the articles I wrote so far about Konstantinos and Athens.

June 16 2015

The Automatic Earth Moves To Athens

June 19 2015

Update: Automatic Earth for Athens Fund

June 25 2015

Off to Greece, and an Update on our Athens Fund

July 8 2015

Automatic Earth Fund for Athens Makes First Donation

July 11 2015

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

July 22 2015

AE Fund for Athens: Update no. 3: Peristeri

Nov 24 2015

The Automatic Earth -Finally- Returns To Athens

Dec 25 2015

Help the Automatic Earth Help the Poorest Greeks and Refugees

Feb 1 2016

The Automatic Earth is Back in Athens, Again

Mar 2 2016

The Automatic Earth for Athens Fund Feeds Refugees (Too)

Aug 9 2016

Meanwhile in Greece..

 

 


Konstantinos and a happy refugee

 


Jodi Graphics What Greece lost in one year, 2014

 

 

Debt Rattle September 11 2016

Sep 112016
 
 September 11, 2016  Posted by at 9:28 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,  6 Responses »


Harris&Ewing No caption, Washington DC 1915

• Fed Dove Frets About Asset Bubbles, Wall Street Freaks Out (WS)
• Hostage to a Bull Market (Jim Grant)
• Leverage Soars to New Heights as Corporate Bond Deluge Rolls On (BBG)
• On Nov. 8 Americans Decide To Either Rescue The Banks Or The Consumer (RI)
• Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts (BBG)
• It’s Business As Usual At Wells Fargo After Record Fine (MW)
• New Zealand Prepares for the Party to End (Hickey)
• Italy’s Renzi: At Last Hollande Is With Us, We Can Cause A Stir (Kath.)
• Yanis Varoufakis’s Fantasy Politics (Jacobin)
• Greek PM Tsipras Pledges Growth Amid Protests, Austerity Plans (AP)
• EU Adds €115 Million In Aid For Migrants In Greece (DW)
• Rescuers Bring 2,300 Migrants To Safety From Mediterranean on Saturday (R.)

 

 

There’s only one solution: take away from central banks their current powers to manipulate markets and economies.

• Fed Dove Frets About Asset Bubbles, Wall Street Freaks Out (WS)

When Boston Fed governor Eric Rosengren, a voting member of the Federal Open Markets Committee, where monetary policy is decided, shared some aspects of his worries on Friday morning, markets tanked instantly. This came just after the ECB’s refusal to please the markets with promises of additional bond purchases. Instead, it stuck to the promises it had made previously. What a disappointment for markets running on nothing but central-bank mouth-wagging and money-printing! [..] In his speech, Rosengren discussed how the US economy has been “fairly resilient” and is near “reaching the Federal Reserve’s dual mandate from Congress (stable prices and maximum sustainable employment),” despite all the global headwinds, some of which he enumerated.

And so, he said, “a reasonable case can be made for continuing to pursue a gradual normalization of monetary policy.” Hence, rate increases, even though there were some “conflicting signals” in the economic data – “Clearly, the first two quarters did not live up to the forecasts,” he said. But “waiting too long to tighten” would expose the economy to two risks: First, the economy overheats – the belated tightening might “require more rapid increases in interest rates later in the cycle,” which will likely “result” in a recession, as it did “frequently” in the past. And second, asset bubbles – “that some asset markets become too ebullient.” He pointed at commercial real estate prices that “have risen quite rapidly over the past five years, particularly for multifamily properties.”

He added: Because commercial real estate is widely held in the portfolios of leveraged institutions, commercial real estate cycles can amplify the impact of economic downturns as financial institutions need to write down the value of loans and cut back on lending to maintain their capital ratios. And what a bubble it is. Over the past 12 months, prices have jumped only 6%, according to the Green Street Commercial Property Price Index, compared to the double-digit gains in prior years. “Equilibrium,” the report called it. The index has soared 107% from May 2009, and 26.5% from the peak of the totally crazy prior bubble that ended with such spectacular fireworks:

Read more …

Excellent from Grant, fully in line with Nicole’s series the past week.

• Hostage to a Bull Market (Jim Grant)

If there is a curse between the covers of this thin, self-satisfied volume, it doesn’t have to do with cash, the title to the contrary notwithstanding. Freedom is rather the subject of the author’s malediction. He’s not against it in principle, only in practice. Ken Rogoff is a chaired Harvard economics professor, a one-time chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and (to boot) a chess grandmaster. He laid out his case against cash in a Saturday essay in this newspaper two weeks ago. By abolishing large-denomination bills, he said there, the government could strike a blow against sin and perfect the Federal Reserve’s control of interest rates. “The Curse of Cash,” the Rogoffian case in full, comes in two parts.

The first is a helping of monetary small bites: a little history (in which the gold standard gets the back of the author’s hand), a little central-banking practice, a little underground economy. It’s all in the service of showing where money came from and where it should be going. Terrorists traffic in cash, Mr. Rogoff observes. So do drug dealers and tax cheats. Good, compliant citizens rarely touch the $100 bills that constitute a sizable portion of the suspiciously immense volume of greenbacks outstanding—$4,200 per capita. Get rid of them is the author’s message. Then, again, one could legalize certain narcotics to discommode the drug dealers and adopt Steve Forbes’s flat tax to fill up the Treasury. Mr. Rogoff considers neither policy option. Government control is not only his preferred position.

It is the only position that seems to cross his mind. Which brings us to the business end of this production. Come the next recession, the book’s second part contends, the Fed should have the latitude to drive interest rates below zero. Mr. Rogoff lays the blame for America’s lamentable post-financial-crisis economic record not on the Obama administration’s suffocating tax and regulatory policies. The problem is rather the Fed’s inability to put its main interest rate, the federal funds rate, where it has never been before. In a deep recession, Mr. Rogoff proposes, the Fed ought not to stop cutting rates when it comes to zero. It should plunge right ahead, to minus 1%, minus 2%, minus 3% and so forth.

At one negative rate or another, the theory goes, despoiled bank depositors will stop saving and start spending. According to the worldview of the people who constitute what Mr. Rogoff fraternally calls the “policy community” (who elected them?), the spending will buttress “aggregate demand,” thus restore prosperity. You may doubt this. Mr. Rogoff himself sees difficulties. For him, the problem is cash. The ungrateful objects of the policy community’s statecraft will stockpile it. What would you do if your bank docked you, say, 3% a year for the privilege of holding your money? Why, you might convert your deposit into $100 bills, rent a safe deposit box and count yourself a shrewd investor. Hence the shooting war against currency.

Read more …

Historians will see us as too deluded to be true.

• Leverage Soars to New Heights as Corporate Bond Deluge Rolls On (BBG)

Here’s a gut check for bond investors: corporate America is now more leveraged than ever. As this year’s corporate bond sales raced past $1 trillion on Wednesday – marking the fifth consecutive year of trillion-plus issuance – Morgan Stanley published a report Friday highlighting the growing strains on company balance sheets. The report, which estimated US companies’ collective debt at a record 2.4 times their collective earnings as of June, comes at a time of growing angst in global bond markets “The investment-grade ‘safe’ part of the market is becoming the most dangerous,” said Ashish Shah, CIO at AllianceBernstein. “There are so little returns out there. People are crowding into whatever they can.”

The debt metric, which doesn’t include banks and other financial companies, has climbed for five straight quarters as corporate profits decline at the same time companies load up on the increasingly cheap borrowings, Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Richmond wrote in a note to clients. In 2010, when the U.S. economy started recovering from the longest recession since the Great Depression, the ratio fell to 1.7 times. But what has the analysts uneasy isn’t just the speed at which leverage is climbing, but that it’s happening while the economy continues to grow. “Leverage tends to rise most in a recession – so the fact that it is this high in a ‘healthy economy’ is even more concerning,” the analysts wrote. In other words, they said, “mistakes are both more likely and more costly.”

The analysts’ assessment wasn’t totally worrisome. Years of near-zero interest rates have made it a lot easier to service those debt loads. The typical company’s annual earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, known as Ebitda, is still almost 10 times its interest payments, Morgan Stanley’s data shows. Even that number has been declining, though, as earnings slump.

Read more …

“Today, consumption can only increase if someone hands out money. This money cannot be earned by companies, because consumers are unable to buy additional products.”

• On Nov. 8 Americans Decide To Either Rescue The Banks Or The Consumer (RI)

Recently, the Fed decided not to change interest rates. Various reasons were given, but as we know, there are two “parties” in the US, one which favors monetary easing, and the other, tightening, and each has arguments for their case. Economists are divided on how to proceed. They disagree on precisely this: which economic policies can facilitate growth in our times? A brief look at the last 50 years provides some context. In the 70s, household incomes fell, most of all from 1972-73, and with them, spending. Starting in 1981, (Reaganomics!), spending began to rise, but income, hardly at all. Economic growth was due to increased consumption driven by a rise in household debt, and from 2008 on, in government debt. If we look at real disposable household income, it is the same today as it was in the early 60s.

Today, average household debt is 120% of annual income, whereas up until 1981 it never exceeded 65%. Note too, that in 1981, the discount rate was 19%, whereas today it is practically zero. Today, consumption can only increase if someone hands out money. This money cannot be earned by companies, because consumers are unable to buy additional products. So the only way is to increase debt. But lowering interest rates is impossible because they are already at zero. So there are two options: 1) print money and hand it out to people through the banks, with the understanding that this money will not be returned, or 2) restructure the existing debt, both personal and corporate, in the hopes that then people will start to consume.

In order to do this, interest rates would have to be raised to at least 3-4%, with the banks taking a major hit, because their customers cannot service their loans at those rates… Voila the collision of interests between the people and the banks. Unsurprisingly, the two US candidates disagree on this issue. Clinton is for option 1, i.e. more monetary easing (helping the banks), and Trump is for tightening (helping the people). The choice, of course, lies with the American voter.

Read more …

And nobody in management noticed a thing?

• Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts (BBG)

[..] Wells Fargo was fined $185 million by various regulators for opening customer accounts without the customers’ permission, and that is bad, but there is also something almost heroic about it. There’s a standard story in most bank scandals, in which small groups of highly paid traders gleefully and ungrammatically conspire to rip-off customers and make a lot of money for themselves and their bank. This isn’t that. This looks more like a vast uprising of low-paid and ill-treated Wells Fargo employees against their bosses. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which fined Wells Fargo $100 million, reports that about 5,300 employees have been fired for signing customers up for fake accounts since 2011. You’d have a tough time organizing 5,300 people into a conspiracy, which makes me think that this was less a conspiracy and more a spontaneous revolt.

Read more …

“Wells Fargo’s punishment comes to only 0.9% of the $22.9 billion that the bank earned last year..”

• It’s Business As Usual At Wells Fargo After Record Fine (MW)

“The fine is a rounding error, and I don’t see any unintended consequences.” So said FBR analyst Paul Miller, describing the $185 million in fines and penalties, plus another $5 million for “customer remediation,” that Wells Fargo agreed to pay. Wells Fargo’s punishment comes to only 0.9% of the $22.9 billion that the bank earned last year. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found “widespread unlawful practices” at the third-largest U.S. bank by assets, including the opening of “hundreds of thousands” of accounts by employees without customers’ knowledge so employees could hit lofty sales targets. The fine was the largest levied since the CFPB’s founding in 2011.

Shares of San Francisco-based Wells Fargo fell 2.4% at the close of regular trading Friday, in line with the benchmark S&P 500 suggesting a low level of worry among investors. But there could be longer-term consequences for the bank’s reputation, as Federal Reserve Gov. Daniel Tarullo said during a CNBC interview that criminal charges against bank officers should be pursued. In Wells Fargo’s more than 6,000 retail branches, there has long been a culture of cross-selling as many products to customers as possible, which has been a big part of the bank’s success for decades, according to Marty Mosby, director of bank and equity strategies at Memphis, Tenn.-based broker-dealer Vining Sparks.

Read more …

I’m afraid the walls will have to come crumbling down before Kiwis accept their reality.

• New Zealand Prepares for the Party to End (Hickey)

Should we all celebrate? Or sink into a great depression, or run for the nearest bunker? It’s hard to know how to react to the news Auckland’s average house value rose over $1 million in August. Auckland’s homeowners should in theory be celebrating their good fortune and voting for more of the same. Anyone who invested just over $53,000 of their money in 2011 to buy an average Auckland house with a 90% mortgage would now be sitting on tax-free capital gains of $486,000. Indeed, some are celebrating. New car sales are at record highs and spending in Auckland’s cafes, bars and restaurants is growing at double-digit rates. But it’s not the sort of go-for-broke debt-fuelled spending binge like the one we saw from 2002-07 when mortgage lending grew at an annual rate of 15%.

Mortgage debt grew 9% in the last year and most people think it has peaked, given the Reserve Bank’s latest restrictions on low deposit lending and a limit on debt to income multiples expected next year. Most Aucklanders don’t believe the manna from the great housing gods in the heavens is real enough to go withdrawing from their household ATMs, which is why the lending growth is relatively subdued. They can also feel in their bones that house prices at 10 times incomes are hyper≠ventilated, if not downright over-valued. New Zealand’s house-price-to-income multiple is the second-most-expensive relative to long run averages in the OECD (behind Belgium), and is the most expensive relative to rents in the OECD. That overvaluation has grown more than any other country in the OECD over the past six years.

This is not the sort of world champion tag we want. The $1m milestone is clearly a moment of despair for those young Aucklanders aspiring to own a home and start a family, particularly those whose parents were also renters. The combination of the price rises and the new LVR rules mean they face decades of saving for a deposit, let along being able to borrow the hundreds and hundreds of thousands to buy a home. All they can hope for is to win Lotto or to marry into a rich family. Another response is to hunker down and prepare for an implosion, which means saving madly to repay debt ahead of the housing market end-times and to diversify into other types of assets. This isn’t so much a celebration as a preparing for the party to be shut down.

Read more …

Really?

• Italy’s Renzi: At Last Hollande Is With Us, We Can Cause A Stir (Kath.)

After the EU-Mediterranean summit in Athens on Friday, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi expressed his satisfaction that French President Francois Hollande joined Alexis Tsipras’s initiative to form a front against austerity, Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper reported on Saturday. “At last, Hollande is with us, he got over his indecisiveness,” the paper quoted Renzi as saying. “Now we can take action.” On the flight back to Rome from Athens, Renzi appeared more than satisfied with the outcome of the summit, the paper reported. Renzi is said to have expressed relief, in comments to journalists, that Hollande signed a declaration embracing the policies that Italy and other southern European countries are promoting. “Now we are many, we can cause a stir,” Renzi is reported to have said, adding that he expected that “in the future the balance of power will change.”

Read more …

Much as I appreciate Yanis, I’m afraid I have to agree with much of this article. Reforming the EU is akin to reforming the mob. Why not put your energy into an organization that exists ‘parallel’ to the EU?

• Yanis Varoufakis’s Fantasy Politics (Jacobin)

To his credit, Varoufakis at least recognizes that progressives “have no alternative” but a “head-on clash with the EU establishment,” since the European Union simply cannot be reformed to make it more democratic. But, he nonetheless insists, leftists must not support referenda to leave the EU. He offers two confused reasons for this. First, since exit referenda are “movements that have been devised and led primarily by the Right,” it is “unlikely” that joining them “will help the Left block their opponents’ political ascendancy.” This left defeatism is simply a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the Left refuses to lead exit referenda campaigns, of course the running will be left to the Right. And since the Left cannot convincingly defend the European Union, that leaves the Right to benefit.

Secondly, Varoufakis suggests that restoring national democracy will mean the end of the free movement of “workers.” “Given that the EU has established free movement, Lexit involves acquiescence to – if not actual support for – the reestablishment of national border controls, complete with barbed wire and armed guards.” Leaving aside the fact that left-wing leadership could theoretically persuade an electorate to accept open borders, this defence of the EU is simply bizarre. The European Union is very far from “borderless” (his word). It has created free movement not for “workers,” but for EU citizens, albeit limited for the citizens from accession countries.

But for non-EU workers, the European Union has established Fortress Europe: “barbed wire and armed guards” surround the continent, resulting in thousands of dead Africans and Asians in the Mediterranean Sea, and hundreds of thousands more languishing in squalid conditions in southeast Europe (including Varoufakis’s own home country, Greece) and Turkey. Moreover, the migration crisis has led to the restoration of “barbed wire and armed guards” across the continent. The idea that the European Union safeguards some sort of workers’ paradise of open borders against right-wing revanchism is ludicrous.

Read more …

Growth is a pipedream wih half your young people long term unemployed (which kills economic activity), wages as low as €100 a week, and pensions at €380 a month (both of which kill consumption).

• Greek PM Tsipras Pledges Growth Amid Protests, Austerity Plans (AP)

Greece’s prime minister promised Saturday to deliver economic growth to a country hammered by years of economic hardship, as thousands gathered in protest at more planned austerity measures. About 15,000 protesters – beating drums, waving black flags and holding helium balloons bearing anti-government slogans – took part in demonstrations, marching through the center of Greece’s second-largest city, Thessaloniki, where Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke on the state of the nation’s economy. “In five disastrous years … a quarter of our national wealth was destroyed, disposable income fell by 40%, unemployment soared to 28% and the level of poverty rose to 38%,” Tsipras told an audience of politicians and business leaders, referring to governments before he took office in early 2015.

“Now, all the indications are that this chapter is closing…Finally, we are going from a negative direction to a positive one.” As expected Tsipras said that €246 million, the proceeds of a recent auction of TV licenses, would go toward the “needs of the welfare state.” He promised 10,000 new jobs at state hospitals, thousands more free meals at schools, more kindergarten places and a program aimed at bringing back young Greeks who left the country due to the crisis. “Every last euro of the €246 million will go the people,” he said. He also heralded a 5-year action plan – “a realistic road map for the recovery of the economy and reduction of burdens” – that would bring about a “new Greece” by 2021 and promised to freeze the social security contributions of self-employed Greeks as well as reducing taxes in two years time.

Read more …

I had to read 5-6 versions of this, in order to find where the money would be going. Turns out, as I feared, that it goes not to the Greeks but to -mostly- international NGOs, who’ve done a far from stellar job. Give a fraction of the €115 million to Konstantinos and his O Allos Anthropos ‘movement’ that we support, and many more people get help. That this is still needed despite the 100s of millions of euros doled out to those NGOs says more than enough. International NGOs are way too expensive and inefficient. So please click that link and help The Automatic Earth help where it counts.

• EU Adds €115 Million In Aid For Migrants In Greece (DW)

The European Union will provide humanitarian organizations in Greece an additional €115 million on top of €83 million from earlier this year, the European Commission said on Saturday. “The European Commission continues to put solidarity into action to better manage the refugee crisis, in close cooperation with the Greek Government,” Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Christos Stylianides said. “The new funding has the key aim to improve conditions for refugees in Greece, and make a difference ahead of the upcoming winter.”

About 60,000 refugees and migrants are stranded in Greece due to border closures implemented earlier this year in the Balkans. Rights organizations have documented poor conditions in overcrowded camps. The new funding will help improve existing shelters and build new ones, pay for a voucher system for migrants, and provide education and other support to unaccompanied minors. It will be channelled via humanitarian organizations. The EU’s emergency support aid is in addition to financial assistance given under other funding programmes.

Read more …

A routine day.

• Rescuers Bring 2,300 Migrants To Safety From Mediterranean on Saturday (R.)

Rescuers pulled 2,300 migrants to safety on Saturday in 18 separate rescue operations in the Mediterranean coordinated by the Italian coast guard. A Spanish boat belonging to an EU naval force, an Irish navy vessel and boats of four non-governmental organizations were involved in the rescue operations, the coast guard said in a statement. It did not say where the migrants, who were traveling in 17 rubber vessel and one small boat, originally came from. Since moves to stop people crossing from Turkey to Greece, Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War Two is now focused on Italy, where some 115,000 people had arrived by the end of August, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR.

Read more …

Debt Rattle September 7 2015

Sep 072015
 
 September 7, 2015  Posted by at 9:29 am Finance Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,  4 Responses »


Dorothea Lange Saturday afternoon, Pittsboro, North Carolina Jul 1939

• Father Of The Euro Fears EU Superstate By The Back Door (AEP)
• UN Agencies ‘Broke And Failing’ In Face Of Ever-Growing Refugee Crisis (Guardian)
• Europe Debates Migrant Quota Buyout Plan (FT)
• Get Ready For A Real Lousy Month In The Stock Market (MarketWatch)
• Forex Reserves Unwind Could Reverse Global Bond Supercycle (Reuters)
• Capital Flight Now The Big Concern For Slowing China (FT)
• China Freezes Outbound Investment Quotas as Outflows Hurt Yuan (Bloomberg)
• China Revises Down 2014 GDP To 7.3% From 7.4% (CNBC, Reuters)
• As Europe Grasps for Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Borders (NY Times)
• Pope Francis Calls On European Parishes To House Up To 500,000 Refugees (WaPo)
• ‘If This Is Your Idea Of Europe, You Can Keep It’ (CNBC)
• The Refugee Crisis Isn’t a ‘European Problem’ (Michael Ignatieff)
• Refugee Flow Linked To Turkish Policy Shift (Kath.)
• Hungarian Official Admits Campaign To Generate Hate Against Migrants (EurActiv)
• Merkel Seeks $6.7 Billion for Refugees NEXT YEAR! (Bloomberg)
• Greece Asks EU For Humanitarian Aid To Cope With Refugee Crisis (Reuters)
• Statement By The President Of SYRIZA On The Refugees (Alexis Tsipras)
• Tsipras Vows Battle To Improve Bailout After Greek Election (Reuters)
• On The State Of The European Union (Yanis Varoufakis)
• Greek Crisis Prompts A Rethink On Food Waste (AFP)

No doubt the plans are being laid out in secret.

• Father Of The Euro Fears EU Superstate By The Back Door (AEP)

The euro’s founding father has warned that Europe’s latest plan for an EMU-wide finance ministry is a dangerous attempt to smuggle through political union, and breaches the basic tenets of modern democracy. Professor Otmar Issing, the chief architect of monetary union through its early years, said it would be “dangerous” to transfer control over tax and spending to the EU federal level before full political union has been established first on democratic foundations. Such a quantum leap in the constitutional structure of Europe – effectively the creation of an EU superstate, with a parliament comparable in power to the US Congress – is unthinkable in the current political atmosphere. It would require referenda across Europe, and a two-thirds majority in both houses of the German parliament.

“The chances of political union are close to zero,” he said, speaking at the Ambrosetti forum of world policymakers on Lake Como. If Europe were to jump the gun and force the pace of integration, this would lead to a rogue plenipotentiary with unbridled powers over sensitive issues of national life. “It is hard to see how it could be given democratic accountability,” he said. Prof Issing, a towering figure in the pre-EMU Bundesbank and the ECB’s first chief economist, said control of budgets must for now be left to national government and sovereign parliaments that are genuinely answerable to their own peoples. “Political union cannot be obtained in the European Union by the back door. It is a violation of the principle of no taxation without representation, and represents a wrong and dangerous approach,” he said.

Prof Issing was making a clear allusion to the American Revolution and the events that led up to the English Civil War in the 1640s, two great struggles triggered by a monarchical assault on the parliamentary power of the purse. The early democracies of Europe were all rooted in legislative control over spending. The proposals for an EMU finance ministry emerged in a paper by the heads of the Commission, Council, Parliament, Eurogroup, and ECB in June, a document known as the “Five Presidents Report”. It will start with an advisory European fiscal board and a strategic investment fund with enhanced powers, clearly a finance ministry in embryo. It will graduate towards a “euro area Treasury” from 2017 onwards, anchored in the EU treaties.

The report says that the new machinery will be established on a “lasting, fair and democratically legitimate basis”, and is in many ways a soul-searching admission that the EMU project has gone badly wrong, leading to bitter divisions. Yet critics warn that the EU is once again putting the cart before the horse. They point to the same fundamental errors that have led to perma-crisis in monetary union and spawned populist revolts across much of the EU. Prof Issing has always been open to an authentic United States of Europe similar to the US federal democracy. What he objects to is a deformed halfway house where supra-national bodies take decisions behind closed doors. The euro may survive “for a period” under its current structure, but it will break apart if the principles of monetary union are permanently violated. “Pacta sunt servanda (Agreements must be kept),” said Prof Issing.

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Something tells me it’s going to take many meetings. And the outcome will be a huge disappointment. Perhaps we passed peak humanity a while ago and didn’t notice.

• UN Agencies ‘Broke And Failing’ In Face Of Ever-Growing Refugee Crisis (Guardian)

The UN’s humanitarian agencies are on the verge of bankruptcy and unable to meet the basic needs of millions of people because of the size of the refugee crisis in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, senior figures within the UN have told the Guardian. The deteriorating conditions in Lebanon and Jordan, particularly the lack of food and healthcare, have become intolerable for many of the 4 million people who have fled Syria, driving fresh waves of refugees north-west towards Europe and aggravating the current crisis. Speaking to the Guardian, the UN high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said: “If you look at those displaced by conflict per day, in 2010 it was 11,000; last year there were 42,000.

This means a dramatic increase in need, from shelter to water and sanitation, food, medical assistance, education. “The budgets cannot be compared with the growth in need. Our income in 2015 will be around 10% less than in 2014. The global humanitarian community is not broken – as a whole they are more effective than ever before. But we are financially broke.” Recent months have seen severe cuts to food rations for Syrian refugees in Lebanon and Jordan as well as for Somali and Sudanese refugees in Kenya. Darfuris living in camps in Chad have been warned that their rations may end completely at the end of the year. UN-run healthcare services have also been closed across a large part of Iraq, leaving millions of internally displaced people without access to healthcare.

Guterres warned that the damage being done by these cuts would be impossible to reverse. “We know that we are not doing enough, we are failing the basic needs of people. “The situation is beyond irreparable. If you look at the number of children who will see their lives so dramatically impacted by malnutrition and lack of psychosocial support, you will see this is already happening.”

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Commodities trading.

• Europe Debates Migrant Quota Buyout Plan (FT)

European Commission officials are debating a proposal that would allow some EU countries to pay money in order to opt out of a mandatory quota system for accepting refugees, in a plan that could ease a stand-off between eastern and western members over how to relieve Europe’s migrant crisis. Some eastern states have balked at being forced to accept mandatory numbers, under a plan to divide 160,000 migrants across the region to be announced on Wednesday by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. They argue that voluntary targets allow member states to provide better care to people looking to settle in Europe. “We are ready to share the burden and take responsibility, but only if we have control over the situation,” said Poland’s minister for Europe, Rafal Trzaskowski.

Over the summer a harrowing exodus of people from the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan has leapt to the top of Europe’s political agenda, and led to a quadrupling of the EU’s resettlement target from 40,000 people in July. Commission officials and eastern diplomats stressed that the plan would only allow countries to take temporary “time-outs” from any expanded quota regime, in exchange for payments to a fund supporting refugees. “It creates an opportunity for voluntary decision making,” said an eastern EU official. “If they do it with penalties, then that is a bad idea. But if there is a system where you contribute financially to helping the problem in a different way, then that is much more palatable.”EU officials stressed that any opt-out would also have to be justified by “objective reasons” — for example Poland’s desire to have contingency plans in place to accept large numbers of refugees from Ukraine if the conflict there worsens.

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Month, year, decade, you name it.

• Get Ready For A Real Lousy Month In The Stock Market (MarketWatch)

Investor sentiment has suffered with the recent correction and is not likely to improve in the short term, setting stocks up for a volatile September as international concerns overshadow domestic ones. Stocks took a big hit last week with the Dow Jones dropping 3.3%, the S&P 500 shedding 3.4%, and the Nasdaq falling 3%. International factors are feeding market volatility more than any other domestic factor, according to Brad McMillan, chief investment officer at Commonwealth Financial. McMillan said that Germany’s weak manufacturing orders report likely had more to do with Friday’s selloff than the jobs report’s effect on a September rate increase from the Federal Reserve.

What could affect the Fed’s decision is a continued stock market selloff. McMillan said if investors come back from the Labor Day holiday and decide to take risk off the table, the S&P 500 could break down through 1,870 as low as 1,790. If that happens, then the likelihood for a September rate increase falls below 50%, he said. “We’ve got another month or so before confidence bounces back,” McMillan said. “A lot of damage has been done to sentiment.” Others believe the correction still has a ways to go, with one indicator showing that investor sentiment has fallen to “panic” levels. Citi Research’s Tobias Levkovich said his Panic/Euphoria model, which brings together such indicators as short-interest ratios, margin debt, compiled bullishness data, and put/call ratios, broke into “panic” territory for the first time since late 2012.

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“..the dollar value of foreign currency reserves held by all developing nations ballooned by almost $7 trillion in just one decade to a peak of some $8.05 trillion by the middle of last year.” It was $1.05 trillion 10 years ago….

• Forex Reserves Unwind Could Reverse Global Bond Supercycle (Reuters)

China’s summer shock may mark the end of an era of globalization that helped define world markets for more than a decade. Investor anxiety about the consequences is well-founded. Beijing’s integration into the global economy since 2002 reshaped the financial as well as economic landscape – mainly by the way China itself and the economies it supercharged with outsize demand for raw materials banked the hard cash windfalls they earned over the following 12 years. According to the IMF, the dollar value of foreign currency reserves held by all developing nations ballooned by almost $7 trillion in just one decade to a peak of some $8.05 trillion by the middle of last year.

While China was the main driver, accounting for about half of that increase, its economic boom created a commodity supercycle that flooded the coffers of resource-rich nations from across Asia to Russia, Brazil and the Gulf. As the vast bulk of this hard cash was banked in U.S. Treasury and other low risk, rich-country bonds, they were at least one critical factor in the halving of U.S. Treasury and other Group of Seven government borrowing costs over the same period. Alongside the disinflationary impact of China’s low cost labor on western goods imports and wages, this reserve stash helped extend what has now been a 20-year bull market in bonds.

What’s more, the drop in yields, by skewing relative returns between stocks and bonds and also the relative cost of capital for companies, also at least partly underwrote a post-credit crisis surge in equity prices to successive records. Reverse that bond buying, even at the margin, and world asset markets may have a major problem. That’s especially so at a time when the big other marginal bid for bonds, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing program, has ended and when western recoveries are pressuring the Fed and others to normalize near zero interest rates.

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How much longer can China keep up the pretense?

• Capital Flight Now The Big Concern For Slowing China (FT)

Last month, Dalian Wanda, one of the most outward facing corporates in China, bought the organiser of the Ironman triathlons from a US private equity firm for $650 million. Meanwhile, Anbang Insurance, another company with similar global aspirations, looked less likely to succeed in its courtship of the Portuguese authorities in the hope of purchasing the remnants of a troubled financial conglomerate in Lisbon — precisely because the Chinese already have purchased so many assets there. At the same time, Chinese tourists continue to flood destinations like Japan, purchasing luxury goods which have become ever more inexpensive as a result of the steady appreciation of the Chinese currency, with the intention to sell them back home for a tidy profit.

It is hard to know what represents prudent diversification and what constitutes capital flight on the part of Chinese groups and wealthy travellers. But for those who track capital outflows from China, the distinction does not much matter. In the four quarters to the end of June, such outflows, (which do not include debt repayment) have totalled more than $500 billion according to data from Citigroup. China’s mountain of foreign reserves, once around $4 trillion, are now down to less than $3.7 trillion and are expected to drop further to $3.3 trillion by the end of the year, Citi calculates. Not long ago, it seems that the world was awash in cheap dollars. Many of those cheap dollars could be traced to the generous monetary policies of the Federal Reserve.

But many of them also came from the mainland as Chinese recycled their dollar earnings from the sale of exports abroad. Chinese capital flowed into everything from farms in Africa to ports in Sri Lanka and Pakistan, to dairies in New Zealand, energy firms in Canada and Treasuries in the US. More recently China started undertaking massive new, and expensive initiatives including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, its Silk Route projects and a recapitalisation of the two policy banks that help recycle its reserves.

Suddenly, though, the question has shifted from what China will do with all the capital that flowed in and its arguably excessive reserves to whether it has enough money and adequate reserves at all. “It is neither the sell-off in Chinese stocks nor weakness in the currency that matters most,” notes George Saravelos, a currency strategist in London with Deutsche Bank. “It is what is happening to China’s FX reserves and what this means for global liquidity. The People’s Bank of China’s actions are equivalent to an unwind of QE or, in other words, Quantitative Tightening.”

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Shanghai down another 2.52% today.

• China Freezes Outbound Investment Quotas as Outflows Hurt Yuan (Bloomberg)

China refrained from granting new quotas for residents to invest in overseas markets for a fifth month in August, the longest halt in six years, as authorities seek to stem weakness in the yuan. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, which has approved 132 local institutions to put as much as $89.99 billion in offshore assets via its Qualified Domestic Institutional Investor program, hasn’t granted new allocations since March. Quotas for overseas investors to access domestic capital markets rose $16.4 billion to $140.3 billion in the period, data from the regulator show. The yuan traded 1.5% weaker outside of China than inside the country on Monday, indicating depreciation pressure.

China is trying to open its capital account enough for the yuan to win reserve status from the International Monetary Fund, while trying to curb an exodus of funds from an economy expanding at the slowest pace since 1990. Chinese investors are seeking to diversify in overseas assets after the Shanghai Composite Index of shares tumbled 39% from this year’s peak on June 12. The yuan slumped 3.6% in Shanghai and 4.9% in Hong Kong in the past 12 months. “Interest is there but whether the money can leave in the short term is the problem,” said Thomas Kwan, Hong Kong-based chief investment officer at Harvest Global Investments Ltd., whose Chinese unit offers QDII funds. “To avoid triggering excessive yuan outflows, I don’t think regulators would grant additional QDII quotas in the short term.”

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Stand up act. Very funny people, the Chinese.

• China Revises Down 2014 GDP To 7.3% From 7.4% (CNBC, Reuters)

China’s National Bureau of Statistics on Monday revised down 2014 gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 7.3% from a previously reported 7.4%. This growth revision comes on the back of comments by China’s Finance Minister Lou Jiwei over the weekend that GDP growth will remain around 7% in 2015, as predicted earlier in the year, and the new economic normal may last for four to five years. A lower GDP number for 2014 should also make year-on-year comparisons for economic growth in 2015 more favorable. GDP stood at 63.6 trillion yuan ($10.00 trillion) last year, down by 32.4 billion yuan from the initial estimate, Reuters reported, citing the statistics bureau.

“China revises growth data every year, but it’s usually upwards. In that regard, it is unusual that the revision was downwards,” said Dariusz Kowalczyk, senior economist and strategist at Credit Agricole. “Rationally speaking, a 0.1% revision isn’t a big deal – and it doesn’t tell us much about the Chinese economy, but when it comes to sentiment, this is a negative development,” he said. The government will not particularly care about quarterly economic fluctuations and maintain steady macro-economic policy, Lou said, according to a statement late Saturday on the People’s Bank of China website. China is headed for its slowest economic expansion in 25 years in 2015 and mainland markets have slumped 40% since mid-June, sending global financial markets skittering.

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“Like a zoo,” Mr. Hadad said. “Like we are dogs.”

• As Europe Grasps for Answers, More Migrants Flood Its Borders (NY Times)

Along Hungary’s border with Serbia, the scene was anything but smooth. “While Europe rejoiced in happy images from Austria and Greece yesterday, refugees crossing into Hungary right now see a very different picture: riot police and a cold, hard ground to sleep on,” Barbora Cernusakova, an Amnesty International researcher, said in a statement released by the group. The new camp in Roszke was being called a “reception center” by Hungarian officials, though the police on the scene referred to it as an “alien holding center.” Both migrants and relief groups were reporting harsh treatment and a hostile reception from the border authorities. On the Serbian side, officials temporarily blocked at least some trains headed north, amid numerous reports of the police demanding bribes to allow the migrants to pass.

Photos on social media from the new camp showed the police with dogs guarding a desolate compound surrounded by high fences. Omar Hadad, 24, from Dara’a, Syria, had been at a nearby camp along the border before he was shifted on Sunday to one west of Budapest, in the town of Bicske. “The Hungarian police came into the camp and they beat me with batons,” he said of his time in the holding center near the Serbian border. He peeled off his socks to show a bruised foot and leg. Journalists were not allowed into the Bicske camp, but the migrants could come out or speak across the entrance gate. Several other migrants rushed toward Mr. Hadad when they saw him displaying his wounds.

“Here, here, look,” said Salam Barajakly, a student from Damascus who began counting off the wounds and scars on his arms, legs and neck that he said he had gotten on the journey to Hungary, some by accident, some from the police, some from crawling under razor-wire fences. Two men held out smartphones showing videos of the camp where they had been held near the Serbian border. Hundreds of people squatted in the dust while the police tossed sandwiches and bottles of water to them over a barbed-wire fence. “Like a zoo,” Mr. Hadad said. “Like we are dogs.”

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And that’s just the Catholics. But let’s see the response.

• Pope Francis Calls On European Parishes To House Up To 500,000 Refugees (WaPo)

In a statement that could have far-reaching implications, Pope Francis called on all Catholic parishes and monasteries in Europe to each house one refugee family that has fled “death from war and hunger.” “Every parish, every religious community, every monastery, every sanctuary of Europe, take in one family,” the pope said during his customary Sunday address, the news agency Agence France-Presse reported. He also said the Vatican will welcome two families of refugees. There are about 122,000 Catholic parishes in Europe, according to a study conducted by Georgetown University and published in June. If each of them housed one refugee family consisting of three to four people, about 360,000 to 500,000 refugees could be accommodated in the coming months.

It is unclear, however, whether all parishes will accede to the pope’s wish. In addition, housing refugees in parishes would have little bearing on the strict policies in countries such as France that have left desperate refugees — fleeing conflict and persecution — with limited options when they make their way to European shores. Addressing thousands of people in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, Francis provided few details about his call to accommodate refugees, many of whom are not Catholics. The pope called his idea a “concrete gesture” ahead of a “year of mercy” that starts in December. The announcement, nevertheless, could relieve some of the countries that have taken in a large share of the refugees who have recently arrived in Europe, such as Germany or Sweden.

If all of Germany’s 12,000 parishes responded favorably to the pope’s demand, they alone could house a total of more than 30,000 refugees, according to Reuters. However, Germany expects about 800,000 refugees to apply for asylum in the country by the end of the year. The pope’s push resembles other, smaller initiatives already popular in the country. Some Germans have invited refugees to stay in their homes for free as authorities confront increasing difficulties in their bid to provide adequate apartments and reception centers. Many refugees are still housed in tent camps, and it is unclear whether alternative housing can be provided before winter arrives, as WorldViews reported earlier.

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“They all knew about it … but they just let it go.”

• ‘If This Is Your Idea Of Europe, You Can Keep It’ (CNBC)

“If this is your idea of Europe, keep it for yourself.” Thus spoke an irate Matteo Renzi, Italy’s Prime Minister, during an E.U. Council meeting last June as his East European colleagues refused any obligation to accept some of the thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees lucky enough to reach alive the Greek and the Italian shores. More than two months later, there is still no unified E.U. policy on how to resettle the growing waves of refugees overwhelming Italy, Greece, Serbia and Hungary. In the middle of all that, some European leaders say they are defending Europe’s Christian values with barbed wires and overcrowded railway cars stuffed with suffocating people – the chilling images reminiscent of the darkest chapters in European history.

Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s Prime Minister, and a self-proclaimed defender of the “Christian Europe,” is justifying such acts by saying that “Europeans are scared because they see that their leaders have completely lost control of the situation.” Along with hundreds of thousands of refugees during the recent Balkan wars, and close to a million of refugees and displaced people from Ukraine’s eastern provinces, this latest human tragedy is emblematic of E.U.’s inability to respond to any major challenges – to say nothing of its inability to anticipate such extraordinary events. And that is not for lack of institutional infrastructure. The E.U. Commission has people in charge of everything – economic, social and foreign policy issues, including even the “specialists” writing the rules and procedures for cheese manufacturing.

The refugee crisis is not a sudden emergency. It is a disaster that has brewed over the past three years. The U.N. confirmed last Friday that it repeatedly warned the E.U. Commission of the coming influx of refugees from war-torn areas of Africa and Middle-East. This horrendous case of ineptitude and mismanagement will remind some of the European “shock” at “discovering” in 2009 that many euro area countries had been violating for years the monetary union’s fiscal rules, and that some of them had totally lost control of their banking systems. How was it possible that nobody knew about that? Jean-Claude Trichet, the former President of the ECB had the answer: “They all knew about it … but they just let it go.”

Can you then blame an angry German Chancellor Angela Merkel for roiling the markets with incendiary statements and imposing debilitating austerity policies to punish the fiscal transgression and banks’ mismanagement in a number of euro area countries? Yes, you can. As a key euro area member, Germany had the responsibility to help enforce the fiscal and financial treaty obligations binding the countries where the euro serves as a legal tender. Anger and vindictiveness are no substitutes for anticipating problems and applying proper policies.

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Amen. Even a failed Canadian politician can oversee this.

• The Refugee Crisis Isn’t a ‘European Problem’ (Michael Ignatieff)

Those of us outside Europe are watching the unbelievable images of the Keleti train station in Budapest, the corpse of a toddler washed up on a Turkish beach, the desperate Syrian families chancing their lives on the night trip to the Greek islands — and we keep being told this is a European problem. The Syrian civil war has created more than four million refugees. The United States has taken in about 1,500 of them. The United States and its allies are at war with the Islamic State in Syria — fine, everyone agrees they are a threat — but don’t we have some responsibility toward the refugees fleeing the combat? If we’ve been arming Syrian rebels, shouldn’t we also be helping the people trying to get out of their way? If we’ve failed to broker peace in Syria, can’t we help the people who can’t wait for peace any longer?

It’s not just the United States that keeps pretending the refugee catastrophe is a European problem. Look at countries that pride themselves on being havens for the homeless. Canada, where I come from? As few as 1,074 Syrians, as of August. Australia? No more than 2,200. Brazil? Fewer than 2,000, as of May. The worst are the petro states. As of last count by Amnesty International, how many Syrian refugees have the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia taken in? Zero. Many of them have been funneling arms into Syria for years, and what have they done to give new homes to the four million people trying to flee? Nothing. The brunt of the crisis has fallen on the Turks, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, the Iraqis and the Lebanese.

Funding appeals by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have failed to meet their targets. The squalor in the refugee camps has become unendurable. Now the refugees have decided, en masse, that if the international community won’t help them, if neither Russia nor the United States is going to force the war to an end, they won’t wait any longer. They are coming our way. And we are surprised? Blaming the Europeans is an alibi and the rest of our excuses — like the refugees don’t have the right papers — are sickening. Political leadership from outside Europe could reverse the paralysis and mutual recrimination inside Europe. The United Nations system to register refugees is overwhelmed. Countries like Hungary say they can’t resettle them all on their own. The obvious solution is for Canada, Australia, the United States, Brazil and other countries to announce that they are willing to send processing teams to Budapest, Athens and the other major entry points to register refugees and process them for admission.

Countries will set their own targets, but for the United States and Canada, for example, a minimum of 25,000 Syrian refugees is a good place to start. (The United States’ recent promise to take in 5,000 to 8,000 Syrian refugees next year is still far too small.) Churches, mosques, community groups and families could agree to sponsor and resettle refugees. Most of the burdened countries — Hungary, Greece, Turkey, Italy — would accept help in a heartbeat. Once these states take a lead, other countries — including those wretched autocrats in the Gulf States — could be shamed into doing their part.

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Somewhat plausible.

• Refugee Flow Linked To Turkish Policy Shift (Kath.)

A sharp increase in the influx of migrants and refugees, mostly from Syria, into Greece is due in part to a shift in Turkey’s geopolitical tactics, according to diplomatic sources. These officials link the wave of migrants into the eastern Aegean to political pressures in neighboring Turkey, which is bracing for snap elections in November, and to a recent decision by Ankara to join the US in bombing Islamic State targets in Syria. The analyses of several officials indicate that the influx from neighboring Turkey is taking place as Turkish officials look the other way or actively promote the exodus. According to one Greek official, security fears are a key reason for Turkey’s encouragement of migrant flows.

“Turkey is facilitating or at least is not hampering the movement of illegal immigrants toward Greece, thinking that in this way it will limit the risk of a possible new terrorist attack on its territory as a reprisal for the military operations it has carried out on Syrian soil,” the official said. Another diplomat said Turkey wants to create a “dead zone” on its border with Syria that would allow the Turkish military to freely move against jihadists and Syrian Kurds. “This is why it is encouraging, or at least not obstructing, the movement of refugees from camps near the Syrian border to the Aegean and Greece,” he said.

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Hungary is largely a nation of former refugees.

• Hungarian Official Admits Campaign To Generate Hate Against Migrants (EurActiv)

A Hungarian official indirectly admitted that the poster campaign ordered by the government last summer to discourage immigrants from coming into the country was aimed at generating hate towards them. Anti-immigration posters put up by the Hungarian government have sparked political controversy since June, featuring slogans such as “If you come to Hungary, you cannot take away Hungarians’ jobs”, and “If you come to Hungary, you have to respect our culture!”

Strangely enough, the posters can hardly be understood by migrants, because they are written in Hungarian. The posters – widely ridiculed on social media – were part of a larger anti-immigration campaign driven by Prime Minister Viktor Orban in response to a surge in asylum seekers. The campaign included a public questionnaire linking migration to terrorism and blaming EU policies for the influx of refugees.

But now a Hungarian official has admitted that the posters were in fact aimed at instigating hate against the migrants. Gergely Prohle, substitute state secretary of EU affairs in the Ministry of Human Resources, started by saying that the radical football hooligans did not become radical due to the country’s poster campaign. Then he added that Hungarian society displayed vast solidarity with the refugees, and if the poster campaign did have the desired effects on our society this would not be so.

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Next year?!

• Merkel Seeks $6.7 Billion for Refugees NEXT YEAR! (Bloomberg)

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government announced plans to spend an extra €6 billion on refugees next year as thousands more migrants poured into the country over the weekend. Merkel’s governing coalition said on Monday that Germany will add 3 billion euros in spending to the 2016 federal budget and provide another €3 billion to states and municipalities to tackle the region’s biggest refugee crisis since World War II. Germany and Austria plan to end emergency measures that allowed the passage of thousands of migrants over the weekend from Hungary without registering in that country. That decision came after talks between Merkel, Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Faymann said in a statement on Sunday.

The countries late on Friday suspended European Union rules that require migrants to register and stay in the EU country where they first enter. The refugees, many coming from war-torn Syria, traveled on trains to Munich’s main station and were then sent to shelters around the country as German citizens volunteered in mass numbers to help the newcomers. Merkel’s government is considering putting excess 2015 tax revenue in a fund that would help cover the refugee costs next year, according to a person familiar with the plans, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. In her weekly podcast, Merkel said the government would stick to its balanced budget goal even as it spends more on refugees.

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Reuters said “Migration crisis”. But that sounds too nonsensical.

• Greece Asks EU For Humanitarian Aid To Cope With Refugee Crisis (Reuters)

Greece asked the European Union on Monday for humanitarian aid to help it cope with what it called “a volatile situation” following the large flow of migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa onto its shores. It requested the EU activate its civil protection mechanism, the bloc’s crisis-response body, to provide staff, medical and pharmaceutical supplies, clothes and equipment, the Interior Ministry said. Greece is struggling to cope with the thousands of people fleeing poverty and war in countries such as Syria for Europe. Tensions have flared on eastern islands including Kos and Lesbos where most refugees land due to their proximity to Turkey.

On Monday morning, a Greek ferry unloaded 2,500 migrants at the port of Piraeus, bringing the total number of people moved to the mainland since last Monday to more than 15,000. Thousands more are waiting to be identified and ferried to Athens to continue their trip to other European countries. “The First Response Service requested that the EU civil protection mechanism is activated in order to substantially strengthen the efforts undertaken by the First Reception Service to manage a volatile situation,” the ministry said. “The satisfaction of the said request is expected to be of critical assistance to the work of the First Response System, which, under current conditions, is extremely difficult.”

The EU’s civil protection mechanism coordinates the bloc’s humanitarian aid efforts, channeling aid and sending special teams with equipment to disaster areas. It has previously helped Greece fight forest fires. European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans and Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos have already promised Athens €33 million to help it tackle the crisis.

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Refugees as an election issue, Alexis? You sure?

• Statement By The President Of SYRIZA On The Refugees (Alexis Tsipras)

Europe is experiencing an unprecedented humanitarian crisis as a result of the refugees that are fleeing war and violence in our region. Greece is at the forefront of this crisis. Yesterday’s picture of three-year old Ailan, dead in the Aegean Sea, on the coast of Bodrum, was a powerful punch in the gut for all of us. And particularly for Europe. A Europe that has responded with initial indifference, nonsensical repression and now awkwardness in the face of a global drama caused by erratic foreign policy and the West’s military interventions.

Yesterday’s horrific picture that shocked the world unfortunately demonstrates the tremendous irresponsibility and great shame of the political forces and especially of New Democracy, which from the outset sought to exploit the problem for petty gains; stoking the most extreme populist instincts, the very ones Golden Dawn is manipulating as well to gain more votes. For now, I will ignore New Democracy’s inability to manage this – even rudimentarily – as a government, and will concentrate on its criticism of open borders. What exactly were they demanding from the Greek government? To use Greek coast guard ships to sink the inflatable boats carrying refugees? And to turn the Aegean into a watery grave for thousands of children like Ailan? Even populism and trying to win votes must have some limits.

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Stop making sense?!

• Tsipras Vows Battle To Improve Bailout After Greek Election (Reuters)

Former prime minister Alexis Tsipras promised on Sunday to fight to improve the terms of Greece’s latest bailout as he tried to shore up a rapidly collapsing lead in opinion polls, two weeks before a snap election. In a campaign speech in the northern town of Thessaloniki, Tsipras offered no new policy ideas but pledged thousands of new jobs and an attack on corruption. He defended his record of battling Greece’s creditors in his seven months in office, even though he was eventually forced to capitulate to their demands to secure the €86 billion rescue package, Greece’s third in a protracted debt crisis that at times has threatened its future in the euro.

“The battle to improve it is far from over,” Tsipras said, referring to the bailout. He said he would seek to win some form of debt relief and press Greek demands to restore collective bargaining powers for workers, a move the creditors oppose. Tsipras resigned last month to make way for the election, hoping to secure a stronger mandate. But having started out as the clear frontrunner, his leftist SYRIZA party’s poll lead has now all but disappeared, making for an unexpectedly close contest against the conservative New Democracy party. The prospect of a fractured result after the September 20 vote has stoked fears of yet more turmoil in a country hit by years of instability and recession, and raised the prospect of Greece having to go to the polls again.

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A sad state. Beyond repair.

• On The State Of The European Union (Yanis Varoufakis)

In a session entitled ‘Old and New Conflicts and Challenges in the EU’, featuring also Peter Sutherland (FT), Mario Monti and Otmar Issing, I used the unwillingness of the Eurogroup, and the troika, even to consider a document prepared by my (then) ministry (entitled “A Policy Framework for Greece’s Fiscal Consolidation, Recover and Growth“) as a case in point of how Europe has lost its integrity and is in the process of losing its soul (judging by the scandalous failure to address the refugee crisis).

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Hats off to the Greek people.

• Greek Crisis Prompts A Rethink On Food Waste (AFP)

With little end to their economic misery in sight, Greeks are finding inventive ways to feed the poor while also fighting waste – a movement that is chipping away at traditional attitudes to food. Three years ago, Xenia Papastavrou came up with a simple idea: take unsold food from shops and restaurants that was headed for the bin, and use it to feed the growing number of Greeks going hungry as the financial crisis took hold. “In June, they gave us 3,000 kilos of melons; in August we got 7,200 cartons of milk,” the 39-year-old told AFP at her office behind Athens’ central market. Boroume (“We Can”), the organization she founded, matches donated foodstuffs with charities in need – whether vegetables, bread or “even these 12 tiropita (cheese pies), which weren’t sold at the bakery.”

These days the food routed through Boroume provides an average of 2,500 meals a day across Greece, from Athens to Thessaloniki in the north. “Greece is a country that throws a lot away,” explained Papastavrou from behind a computer screen covered with data tables and the addresses of charities. In Greek tavernas, if the plates aren’t piled with huge pyramids of food, a meal between friends can be considered a failure, she added. “There isn’t really a mentality of paying attention to this,” she said. “Here, it’s: ‘I’ve paid for it, so I can do what I want with it.'” But years of hardship have started to change habits in a country where official figures show a quarter of the population is at risk of poverty.

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