Jul 10

Today’s News 10th July 2019

  • EU Mulls Sanctions On Turkey After 2nd Drilling Ship Deployed In Cypriot Waters

    Turkey and Europe are headed for a showdown in the eastern Mediterranean over Turkish plans for oil and gas exploration and drilling in Cypriot-recognized waters, with the European Union reportedly now mulling cutting financial assistance to Turkey over the illegal drilling. EU envoys are reportedly meeting Wednesday to discuss various punitive measures against Turkey, including suspending aviation talks and even sanctions.  

    The latest crisis was triggered after Turkish drilling vessel Yavuz sailed to an area off Cyprus’ east coast at the start of this week — the second to follow a first drilling vessel, Fatih, which had already been exploring in Cypriot waters. Notably, the vessels have been accompanied by the Turkish military, including drones, F-16 fighters, and warships. 

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    Turkish drillship Yavuz, via Hurriyet Daily News

    Turkish authorities have been brazen in publicizing their territorial claims and actions backing them, even as EU leaders have slammed the now months-long exploration and drilling expansion in solidarity with Cypriot condemnations (since last May). 

    Turkish Vice President Fuat Oktay had warned over the weekend while speaking from the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus: “Those who move against the legitimate rights of Turkey or the Turkish Cyprus and discount Turkey in the region will not be able to reach their aims,” according to Hurriyet Daily.   

    However, EU foreign minister Federica Mogherini warned Turkey this week that the EU would respond “appropriately and in full solidarity with Cyprus” after Ankara announced the deployment of the Yavuz drilling vessel. Previously, the Fatih had been deployed a mere 42 miles off the west coast of Cyprus.

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    The EU’s Mogherini said following news of the second drill ship deployment that it’s an “unacceptable escalation” which violates EU-member Cyprus’ sovereignty: 

    Turkey’s declared intention to illegally conduct a new drilling operation northeast of Cyprus is of grave concern. This second planned drilling operation, two months after the start of the ongoing drilling operations west of Cyprus, is a further unacceptable escalation, which violates the sovereignty of Cyprus.

    “We call on the Turkish authorities, once again, to refrain from such actions, act in a spirit of good neighborliness and respect the sovereignty and sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus in accordance with international law,” she added. 

    The Cypriot government has repeatedly condemned Turkey’s “blatant violation of international law” and urged the EU to take firmer action. 

    “The Republic of Cyprus is determined to continue to defend its legal rights to the benefit of all its legal citizens, intensifying its efforts at a legal, political and diplomatic level, using all means at its disposal, especially in the framework of the European Union,” a new Cypriot government statement reads. 

    The president of Cyprus Nicos Anastasiades previously slammed Turkey for its “unprecedented escalation of illegal action” which constitutes a “second invasion” in the eastern Mediterranean, blaming Ankara for illegally drilling inside its exclusive economic zone. 

    Both the internationally recognized Greek Cypriot government and Turkey – which occupies northern Cyprus – have overlapping claims of jurisdiction for offshore oil and gas research in the natural gas-rich eastern Mediterranean.

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    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has recently been provocatively sending warships near Cypriot waters in order to ward off foreign competition to oil and gas research, according to Cypriot officials, also seeking to bar Cypriot ships and planes from freely traversing its own European recognized waters. 

    But Erdogan is also bumping up against other Mediterranean countries’ plans in the region — notably Israel and Egypt as well, at a moment he’s engaged in multiple crises both domestic and related to the West — even as Turkey has long sought EU membership.

    Turkey has in the past demanded that Cyprus formally recognize the breakaway Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (since 1974) and allow it to share revenues from Cypriot gas exploration. 

    Furthermore Turkey has laid claim to a waters extending a whopping 200 miles from its coast, brazenly asserting ownership over a swathe of the Mediterranean that even cuts into Greece’s exclusive economic zone.

    Such claims have been condemned by the US, European Union, and Egypt, with NATO officials recently signalling to Turkey that it was out of line. Should the Turkish military attempt to enforce its drilling claims and run up against Cypriot and Greek vessels, it could spark a deadly encounter which would force the EU and NATO to finally weigh in more forcefully. 

  • Kim Darroch: The Simple Explanation

    Authored by Craig Murray,

    The media is full of over-complicated theories as to who might have leaked Kim Darroch’s diplomatic telegrams giving his candid view on the Trump administration.

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    I should start by explaining the FCO telegram system.

    The communications are nowadays effectively encrypted emails, though still known as “telegrams”: to the Americans “cables”. They are widely distributed. These Darroch telegrams would be addressed formally to the Foreign Secretary but have hundreds of other recipients, in the FCO, No.10, Cabinet Office, MOD, DFID, other government departments, MI6, GCHQ, and in scores of other British Embassies abroad. The field of suspects is therefore immense.

    It is very important to note that this is an old fashioned kind of leak which was given to the mainstream media without the documents being published online. It is therefore pretty useless in terms of public information. We haven’t seen the documents, we only know as much as Isabel Oakeshott and the Daily Mail chose to tell us. It is not possible to envision any more untrustworthy or agenda driven filter than that. We can therefore be certain this was not a wikileaks style disclosure in the interests of freedom of information about public servants and their doings, but the agenda was much more specific.

    Darroch’s scathing assessment of Trump is no way out of line with the mainstream media narrative and it is interesting – but exactly what I would expect of him – that Darroch shares the neo-con assumption that Trump’s failure to start a war with Iran over the drone take-down was a weird aberration. The leaks neither tell us anything startling nor obviously benefit any political faction in the UK. So what was the motive?

    I believe the most probable answer is much simpler than anything you will find in the vast amount of media guff printed on the subject these last two days by people with no knowledge.

    Kim Darroch is a rude and aggressive person, who is not pleasant at all to his subordinates. He rose to prominence within the FCO under New Labour at a time when right wing, pro-Israel foreign policy views and support for the Iraq War were important assets to career progress, as was the adoption of a strange “laddish” culture led from No. 10 by Alastair Campbell, involving swearing, football shirts and pretending to be working class (Darroch was privately educated). Macho management was suddenly the thing.

    At a time when news management was the be all and end all for the Blair administration, Darroch was in charge of the FCO’s Media Department. I remember being astonished when, down the telephone, he called me “fucking stupid” for disagreeing with him on some minor policy matter. I had simply never come across that kind of aggression in the FCO before. People who worked directly for him had to put up with this kind of thing all the time.

    Most senior ambassadors used to have interests like Chinese literature and Shostakovitch. Darroch’s are squash and sailing. He is a bull of a man.

    In my view, the most likely source of the leaks is a former subordinate taking revenge for years of bullying, or a present one trying to get rid of an unpleasant boss.

  • UK & France Accept Trump's Call For More Troops In Syria As Germany Rebuffs

    Amid an awkward diplomatic row between the UK and US following leaked cables sent from Britain’s ambassador to the United States back to London which described President Trump as “inept,” “insecure” and “incompetent,” the United Kingdom joined France Tuesday in being among the only US allies to heed the administration’s call to bolster forces in Syria. 

    Notably Germany has rebuffed the US request to deploy additional troops as part of the “anti-ISIS coalition” primarily in Syria’s north and east after US special envoy James Jeffrey told Die Welt’s Sunday edition that,“We want ground forces from Germany to partially replace our soldiers.” This as the Pentagon plans a draw down in line with Trump’s longtime promise to the American public of a “full” and “complete” withdrawal which has been long delayed since last year over concerns that either pro-Assad and Iranian forces or Turkey could fill the vacuum.

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    Image source: Reuters

    The Guardian confirmed the following on Tuesday:

    US officials briefed on Tuesday that Britain and France would contribute 10% to 15% more elite soldiers, although the exact numbers involved remain secret.

    The decision was first reported in the journal Foreign Policy, which described the development as “a major victory … for Donald Trump’s national security team” because few other countries had been willing to help out.

    The US call for increased German presence had reportedly caused deep division in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition, per the AFP:

    Discord broke out in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling coalition Sunday, after the United States urged the country to send ground troops to Syria as Washington looks to withdraw from the region.

    The Pentagon is believed to have slowly begun drawing down its presence in Syria, from a force which is believed to have been anywhere from 2,000 to multiple thousands, down to a possible current level of 400. 

    The UK has not commented on its own troop numbers in Syria, nor how many more it plans to send, but the bulk are believed to be special forces SAS soldiers. 

    The White House has of late been putting pressure on European allies to step up presence in Syria so it can essentially finally “declare victory” against ISIS and get out. 

    Meanwhile, Damascus sees any foreign, US or European presence as “foreign invaders” illegally encroaching on Syrian sovereignty at a moment Washington still prioritizes “countering Iran” in the region. 

  • Weaponizing The Dollar Has Accelerated The Demise Of The US Empire

    Authored by Patrick Lawrence via ConsortiumNews.com,

    The Trump administration’s incessant sanctions wars are curbing the dollar’s global hegemony and speeding the demise of U.S. empire…

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    The signs are mounting steadily now. As the Trump administration weaponizes the dollarin defense of American hegemony, it is prompting many other nations to find alternatives to the U.S. currency as the default medium of exchange. The long-term implications of this swiftly advancing trend, evident among allies as well as those Washington considers adversaries, cannot be overstated: At stake is the longevity of America’s global preeminence.

    The just-concluded Group of 20 session in Osaka, Japan, was a dramatic demonstration of how quickly “de-dollarization” efforts are coalescing. And the pattern could not be clearer: The Trump administration’s incessant use of unilateral economic and financial sanctions against perceived enemies, which is almost certainly without precedent, is high among the reasons these efforts now gather momentum at a pace few in the financial markets or in official circles anticipated.

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    Trump and U.S. team meet with Xi Jinping and Chinese delegation, June 29, 2019, at G-20 in Osaka. (White House/Shealah Craighead)

    The impulse to international trade and financial transactions has been evident for some time. Russia has actively encouraged its trading partners to avoid the dollar in favor of local currencies since Washington imposed sanctions against Russia following the U.S.–cultivated coup in Ukraine five years ago. Russia is now recruiting other nations to participate in its alternative to the U.S.–controlled SWIFT bank-messaging system. China has set up a parallel mechanism, the Cross­–Border Interbank Payments System.    

    China launched an oil-futures market denominated in yuan little more than a year ago. Its annual turnover is already the equivalent of $2.5 trillion. The Shanghai Futures Exchange, where oil futures are traded, recently announced plans to offer forward contracts in rubber, nonferrous metals, and other commodities — all to be transacted in yuan.

    The G–20 gathering marked an important step for these de-dollarization efforts. France, Germany, and Britain announced on the opening day that a trading system developed over the past year to circumvent U.S. sanctions against Iran — and any entity transacting with it — is now operational. The Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, or Instex, replaces the Special Purpose Vehicle Europeans devised a year ago. All three sponsors, along with Russia, China, and the U.S., are signatories of the 2015 accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs, which the U.S. repudiated last year.

    Salvaging the Nuclear Deal

    Instex is intended to salvage the multi-sided agreement without U.S. participation.  And Iranian media reported that the Islamic Republic put in place a corresponding system, the Special Trade and Finance Instrument, last spring. It is not clear how effective Instex will prove in practice or whether it will be enough to persuade Tehran to remain within the bounds of the nuclear accord. The initial signs are mixed: Iran said Sunday that it will begin enriching uranium beyond the pact’s limits; in making the announcement, a foreign ministry official also indicated that Tehran wants to save the agreement.

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    Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, Washington, D.C. (Ron Dicker, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

    However well Instex performs, its geopolitical significance is evident. It effectively institutionalizes a rift in the trans–Atlantic alliance that has widened steadily since the Obama administration force-marched the Europeans into the sanctions against Russia after the Ukraine crisis broke open. Instex is also the most important attempt to date to challenge the dollar’s hegemony as the world’s trading and reserve currency.

    The Osaka G–20 meeting had other surprises. In a major speech before the opening session began, Vladimir Putin urged other members of the BRICS nations —Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — to increase the proportion of its trade conducted in currencies other than the dollar. Given the Russian president spoke at a leading international forum, this was his most pointed challenge to dollar hegemony to date.

    And it starts to look like a concerted effort. Izvestia, the Russian daily, reported simultaneously that the Russian Finance Ministry and the People’s Bank of China, China’s central bank, had just signed an agreement to increase ruble-denominated and yuan-denominated trade to as much as half of bilateral transactions. No timetable for this shift was reported.

    BRICS nations together account for not quite a quarter of global economic output. Last spring theytested a payment system intended to allow users to meet financial obligations in local currencies — an undertaking Putin plainly had in mind when he spoke in Osaka.

    Profligate Use of Sanctions

    The Trump administration’s profligate use of sanctions — they are currently in place against roughly 20 nations, most prominently Iran, Russia, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea — did not inspire the current de-dollarization phenomenon. Trump’s Washington merely forced it forward. It also weakens trust in the dollar every time it freezes the assets of designated adversaries such as Venezuela, or companies and individuals residing in “enemy” nations such as Russia and Iran.

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    Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and Trump during G-20 in Osaka, June 28, 2019. (White House/ Shealah Craighead)

    It is remarkable that this administration so far fails to recognize that it is doing at least as much damage to the dollar’s credibility as any nation planning to circumvent its use. Washington never learns, it seems. Even before the Europeans unveiled Instex in Osaka, the Treasury Department had alreadythreatened to sanction the system’s sponsors and anyone who uses it. 

    The speed with which other nations now seek alternatives to the dollar is also a remarkable feature of the de-dollarization phenomenon. Competition among reserve currencies has long been a recurring topic in financial markets. But until now the end of dollar hegemony has commonly been considered a far-off development unlikely to occur in the lifetime of anyone now living. This is no longer likely to be so.

    It is important, however, not to read too much into Instex and other recent developments. The dollar is not balanced on any precipice of imminent decline. It still accounts for roughly two-thirds of global foreign exchange reserves, according to the International Monetary Fund. A far higher proportion of international transactions are still conducted in the U.S. currency. It remains likely that a serious challenge to dollar hegemony is still a matter of a decade or more in the future.

    But this challenge is now coming. This is how the news from Osaka, Instex, the recent Sino­–Russian agreement, and the efforts of the BRICS are best understood; as the first steps in the mounting of this challenge. Washington’s defense against it will be fierce, harming the lives of many.

    The dollar is the cornerstone of American power. The use of this power, at its most brazen and crude — the sword out of the sheath — is evident now in the sanctions wars. The U.S. can bring any nation it wants to its knees. It can freeze the assets of any entity that is invested in the U.S., has deposits in the U.S., or buys U.S. Treasury paper. Being the world’s sine qua non reserve currency puts the U.S. at the center of global commerce and induces dependence in reverse; everyone needs access to the dollar.

    The currency’s decline, when it begins in earnest, will be a good measure of the American empire’s passing into the past.

  • Mysterious Flying Wing Stealth Drone Makes Appearance In Chinese Promo Video (Photo) 

    According to a new Global Times report, a video has surfaced on Chinese social media that depicts a mysterious flying wing stealth drone for future aircraft carriers.

    Friday marked the 50th anniversary of Shenyang Aircraft Corporation’s J-8 fighter jet, which the company, a subsidiary of state-owned Aviation Industry of China (AVIC), published a promotional video highlighting past success and provided a glimpse of China aerospace in the 21st century.

    “In the latter part of the video, which turned from real life documentary to computer-generated images, a stealth drone featuring a flying wing design was shown operating on an aircraft carrier. The drone seems large, as its landing gear is as tall as a person, the video showed,” the Times reported Sunday.

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    A Chinese military expert who asked not to be named informed the Times that Shenyang has the expertise in designing a ship-based flying wing drone, so officials are expecting to see the drone undergo test flights in the near future.

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    Shenyang also designed China’s first carrier-borne aircraft, the J-15, and is working on the J-31, a fifth-generation stealth fighter that will be launched from carriers.

    “China’s no stranger to either flying wing designs on its drones or to stealth drones. The People’s Liberation Army has also begun to test the Sky Hawk drone as well as the CH-7, the latter of which is also purported to operate from carriers. Shenyang is also rumored to have developed the Sharp Sword flying wing stealth drone,” the Times noted, as per a report from Sputnik.

    The anonymous expert said the new drones would be a multi-mission aircraft: able to conduct land or sea attacks, aerial refueling, and intelligence missions.

    The race for flying wing drones has taken off in the last five years, with the US testing the X-47B and MQ-25 Stingray, both will be operated from aircraft carriers.

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    The benefits of these wing-shaped drones are no fuselage and tails, allow for subsonic cruising as well as a low radar profile.

    Chinese military officials are interested in the next-generation human-crewed and unmanned aircraft on or off carriers to deter Western powers and push them out of the Eastern Hemisphere. More importantly, China is the rising power, challenging the US, the status quo power, through technological advances in defense, is currently arming islands across the South China Sea for the inevitable conflict with the US or one of its allies.

  • 'Mad' Magazine Told The Truth About War, Advertising, And The Media

    Authored by Jeet Heer via TheNation.com,

    “After Mad, drugs were nothing…” – Patti Smith

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    In the summer of 1954, almost any American kid who had the wherewithal to scrounge up a dime could walk into a drugstore and buy the sharp satire on Senator Joseph McCarthy found in the pages of Mad comics #17. The Army-McCarthy hearings had dominated television, and the Wisconsin demagogue had finally alienated so many establishment forces that the Senate was at last moving to censure him. Harvey Kurtzman, the editorial impresario who created Mad, was impressed neither by McCarthy’s buffoonery nor the more deliberative political theater of the Senate. Kurtzman seized on the television drama to recast the whole McCarthy fiasco as a game show called “What’s My Shine?” (a travesty of a then-popular program called What’s My Line?).

    In real life, such as it was, McCarthy brandished a photo purporting to show Army secretary Robert T. Stevens meeting alone with David Schine, a McCarthy crony and reputed lover of McCarthy’s aide, Roy Cohn. That photo turned out to be cropped so that others at the meeting were out of sight. In the Mad version, drawn by cartoonist Jack Davis, Senator Joseph McCartaway, complete with Roy Cohn hanging over his shoulder like a sinister ventriloquist, flaunts a fake photo to prove that “Even Steven is in reality a Red Skin!” As both press and onlookers go bug-eyed, McCartaway fills the TV screen with a picture of the cabinet secretary with a tomahawk and a war bonnet. Mad’s satire was directed not just at McCarthy’s dishonesty but also, more pointedly, at the medium that allowed the rabble-rouser to rule the national stage.

    In Mad, McCarthy and other senators are performing for the TV camera and work their parliamentary antics to fit the time allotted to them by a commercial sponsor. Politics, the story suggests, is just another TV show. The sting of this message has only gotten sharper under the presidency of Donald Trump, Fox News addict and Roy Cohn’s proud political acolyte.

    Last week the magazine’s current owners, DC comics, announced that Mad, which started as a comic book in 1952 and became a magazine in 1955, is on the verge of suspending publication. According to news reports, the magazine will continue publishing issues filled with reprint material to fill out existing subscriptions, but it’ll cease buying new material.

    Born in the troubled era of McCarthyism, Mad is dying in another squalid political epoch. Mad was arguably America’s greatest and most influential satirical magazine, a strange claim to make of a publication that was mostly read throughout its existence by children and teenagers, but still justifiable.

    Mad was often rude, tasteless, and childish – which made it all the more potent as a tributary of youth culture. The kids who read Mad learned from it to distrust authority, whether in the form of politicians, advertisers or media figures. That was a lesson that successive generations took to heart. Without Mad, it’s impossible to imagine underground comics, National Lampoon, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons, The Daily Show, or Stephen Colbert. In the historical sweep of American culture, Mad is the crucial link between the anarchic humor of the Marx Brothers and the counterculture that emerged in the 1960s.

    Writing in The New York Times Magazine on the occasion of Mad’s 25th anniversary in 1977, Tony Hiss and Jeff Lewis argued,

    “Month after month and issue after issue, in a relentlessly good‐natured way, Mad told us that everything was askew—that there were lies in advertising, that other comic hooks lied, that television and movies lied, and that adults, in general, when faced with the unknown, lied.”

    Hiss and Lewis cited an impressive array of cultural figures who attested to Mad’s shaping force. Gloria Steinem said, “There was a spirit of satire and irreverence in Mad that was very important, and it was the only place you could find it in the 50’s.” Singer Patti Smith made a similar point more succinctly: “After Mad, drugs were nothing.”

    Kurtzman, the genius who was the wellspring for Mad, sometimes denied any political intent.

    “I never regarded myself as political,” he once said.

    “I don’t think the fact that you have a platform necessarily gives you to qualification to make a speech.”

    He admitted he made an exception for McCarthy because he was “so evil. It was like doing a satire on Hitler.” But the truth was more complicated. Kurtzman, born in 1924, was something of a red diaper baby. His parents subscribed to The Daily Worker and sent him to the famously progressive Camp Kinderland.

    Kurtzman didn’t inherit his parents’ politics, but his background left him hostile to conventional American culture, which he regarded as filled with lies. Prior to Mad, Kurtzman’s major achievement as a cartoonist was writing and editing two war comics—Two-Fisted Tales and Frontline Combat—which were nearly unique in their unvarnished portrayal of the brutality of the Korean War. “It struck me that war is not a very nice business, and the comic book companies dealing in the subject matter of war tended to make war glamourous,” Kurtzman recalled. “That offended me—so I turned my stories to antiwar.”

    Unlike the war comics, Mad was meant to be funny—but the same underlying ethic, a detestation of lies, guided Kurtzman whether he was doing realistic stories or parodies. Kurtzman’s satire aimed at uncovering the deceptions of the media and popular culture. Mickey Mouse in Kurtzman’s unvarnished version became Mickey Rodent while Superduperman was a “creep” who had an unhealthy fixation on “Lois Pain, Girl Reporter.”

    Kurtzman produced those war books and Mad for EC Comics, run by Bill Gaines, a young publisher who enjoyed risks and didn’t mind legal trouble. The bread and butter of EC Comics were horror comics like Tales from the Crypt which were so lurid they helped incite a best-selling tirade, a Senate investigation, and the eventual creation of an industry-wide censorship code.

    Gaines’s Senate testimony was almost as much of farce as Mad’s rendition of the McCarthy hearings. Pepped up on weight-loss pills, Gaines made a sweaty and unconvincing witness to hostile senators who were not about to buy his advanced theories that teenagers can be trusted with challenging art. These were ideas that might win more favor in other decades, but went completely against the grain of conventional wisdom in the 1950s.

    The early years of Mad were genuinely dangerous times for Gaines. Lyle Stuart, Gaines’s business manager, was arrested for sale of “disgusting literature” in the form of an EC comic book story that parodied Mickey Spillane’s violent detective novels. (The story was called “My Gun Is The Jury”—a riff on Spillane’s I, The Jury). Stuart faced a jail term of a year before the judge threw out the case.

    Besieged by the Senate, the legal system, parent groups, other publishers, and distributors, Gaines had to give up comic books. Turning Mad into a magazine was his lifeboat. Initially, Gaines and Kurtzman were simpatico, although they eventually split in 1956 when Kurtzman asked for half ownership of the magazine.

    When they were on good terms, Gaines didn’t even mind when Kurtzman’s parodies of ads miffed advertisers. In fact, after the break with Kurtzman, Gaines decided to make Mad ad-free in 1957, a policy that continued until 2001 (nearly a decade after Gaines’s death in 1992).

    Gaines would cite the progressive tabloid PM, which briefly flourished in the 1940s, as a precedent for Mad’s no-advertising policy. “In those days there was no such thing as running an anti-cigarette story because they were terrified of losing their cigarette advertising,” Gaines noted. “So PM comes along and tears into everything and doesn’t give a shit.”

    Gaines had the same jaunty nonchalance he admired in PM. One Mad mock-ad in the 1960s had Adolf Hitler endorsing smoking. The parody ran:

    “Hi. I’m Adolph [sic] Hitler. In the 30’s and 40’s we knocked off millions of people and filled countless cemeteries. That’s nothing! I want to talk about a really fantastic cemetery-filler.”

    Mad’s willingness to tweak the noses of the powers that be earned it many enemies. In 1961, retired brigadier general Clyde J. Watts claimed Mad was “the most insidious Communist propaganda in the United States today.” In 1979, Bill Wilkinson, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, wrote to the magazine saying,

    “You and the jew-communist run MAD magazine are obviously trying to do away with the great Red, White and Blue and promote radicalism in this country’s youth.”

    Tragically, the subversive publication that so angered Watts and Wilkinson won’t be around to poison future American generations.

  • First Amendment Stands Strong In Trump vs. Twitter Showdown

    Submitted by Michael Scott of OilPrice.com

    Trump has helped make Twitter one of the most amusingly exciting social media platforms on the planet–but a court now says he’ll have to swallow the bitter pill of criticism because this is, after all, a Democratic country.   Judgment has been handed down: @realDonaldTrump violated the Constitution when he blocked critics on Twitter. 

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    The ruling of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan saw a three-judge panel agree with a lower court judge ruling last year who said Trump was violating the First Amendment when he blocked critics on his Twitter account. According to the court, the First Amendment does not permit a public official using a social media account for “all manner of official purposes” to exclude people from an otherwise-open online dialogue because they disagree with the official.

    Trump’s use of the blocking function was challenged by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, as well as seven Twitter users he had blocked, who included a journalist, a surgeon, and police officer and others.  Judge Barrington Parker said that the president’s account on Twitter is indeed a public forum and that “once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those whose views he disagrees with.”

    The court’s decision upheld a May 2018 ruling by U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan, which prompted Trump to unblock some accounts–but the president failed to oblige.

    The heart of the matter is that this is a world that still doesn’t know what to make of Twitter. 

    Trump has rendered his social media accounts central to his presidency. The account is used to randomly to promote his agenda, fire people, announce resignations, and even as a foreign policy tool. It’s also used, vociferously, to attack his critics, which–as the court has ruled–is a two-way street. 

    The entire fiasco is a microcosm of Trump’s larger love-hate relationship with the tech world, in general. 

    Indeed, Trump appears to believe that the likes of Twitter, Google and Facebook are all ganging up on him. 

    Letting loose on Fox News last week, Trump claimed that Twitter was preventing him from getting followers–a conspiracy he alleged was “possibly illegal”. 

    “You know, I have millions and millions of followers but I will tell you, they make it very hard for people to join me in Twitter, and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message,” he said.

    Trump warned both Twitter and Facebook that they need to “be careful”, after he launched an attack on Twitter, warning it the company that it might be prosecuted for making him look bad (along with Facebook and Google). 

    Days prior to this, Twitter announced it would begin labeling and demoting tweets from world leaders who violate its rules.  Egged on by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who noted that Google is against Trump and doesn’t want him re-elected, Trump claimed to have won that elusive battle. 

    “I won. They were totally against me,” Trump said. “I won.”

    Even last year, the White House said it was looking into whether tech companies were suppressing positive articles about the president after Trump accused Google of manipulating search results to make him look bad. The search engine was rigged “so that almost all stories & news is BAD”, he tweeted.

    He may have a point, at least on one aspect: In July last year, it surfaced that unidentified activists had influenced Google’s algorithm so that when the word “idiot” was typed into Google’s image search, Trump’s was the first returned result. Those results are still active.

    The court ruling comes as Trump is set to hold a Presidential Social Media Summit later this week.

    Facebook and Twitter won’t be attending. 

    Instead, the White House has invited tech’s top conservative critics in politics and media.

  • Escobar: Debunking The Indo-Pacific Myth

    Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

    The Trump administration is obsessively spinning the concept of a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. Apart from a small coterie of scholars, very few people around the world, especially across the Global South, know what that means since the then incipient strategy was first unveiled at the 2017 APEC forum in Vietnam.

    Now everything one needs to know – and especially not know – about the Indo-Pacific is contained in a detailed Pentagon report.

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    Still: is this an act, or the real deal? After all, the strategy was unveiled by “acting” Pentagon head Patrick Shanahan (the Boeing guy), who latter committed hara-kiri, just to be replaced by another, revolving door, “acting” secretary, Mark Espel (the Raytheon guy).

    Shanahan made a big deal of Indo-Pacific when he hit the 18th Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore last month, picking up on his introduction to the Pentagon report to stress the “geopolitical rivalry between free and repressive world order visions” and demonizing China for seeking to “reorder the region to its advantage”.

    In contrast, all the benign Pentagon yearns for is just “freedom” and “openness” for a “networked region”; calling it the New Pentagon Silk Road wouldn’t be far fetched.

    Anyone remotely familiar with “Indo-Pacific” knows that’s code for demonization of China; actually, the Trump administration’s version of Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, which was in itself a State Dept. concoction, via Kurt Campbell, fully appropriated by then Secretary Hillary Clinton.

    “Indo-Pacific” congregates the Quad – US, Japan, India and Australia – in a “free” and “open” God-given mission. Yet this conception of freedom and openness blocks the possibility of China turning the mechanism into a Quintet.

    Add to it what hawkish actor Esper told the Senate Armed Services Committee way back in 2017:

    “My first priority will be readiness – ensuring the total Army is prepared to fight across the full spectrum of conflict. With the Army engaged in over 140 countries around the world, to include combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, training rotations to Europe to deter Russia, and forward deployed units in the Pacific defending against a bellicose North Korea, readiness must be our top priority.”

    That was 2017. Esper didn’t even talk about China – which at the time was not the demonized “existential threat” of today. The Pentagon continues to be all about Full Spectrum Dominance.

    Beijing harbors no illusions about the new Indo-Pacific chief they will be dealing with.

    Surfing FONOP

    “Indo-Pacific” is a hard nut to sell to ASEAN. As much as selected members may allow themselves to profit from some “protection” by the US military, Southeast Asia as a whole maintains top trade relations with China; most nations are participants of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); and they will not shrink from enjoying the benefits of Huawei’s 5G future.

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    ASEAN Defense Senior Officials’ Meeting-Plus Sustainable Security, Thailand, April 4, 2019.

    Actually even the other three in the Quad, as much as they are not linked to BRI, are having second thoughts on playing supportive roles in an all-American super production. They are very careful about their geoeconomic relations with China. “Indo-Pacific”, a club of four, is a de facto late response to BRI – which is indeed open, to over 65 nations so far.

    The Pentagon’s favorite mantra concerns the enforcement of “freedom of navigation operations” (FONOP) – as if China, juggling the countless tentacles of global supply chains, would have any interest in provoking naval insecurity anywhere.

    So far, “Indo-Pacific” has made sure that the US Pacific Command was renamed US Indo-Pacific Command. And that’s about it. Everything remains the same in terms of those FONOPs – in fact a carefully deceptive euphemism for the US Navy to be on 24/7 patrol anywhere across Asian seas, from the Indian to the Pacific, and especially the South China Sea. No ASEAN nation though will be caught dead performing FONOPS in South China Sea waters within 12 nautical miles of rocks and reefs claimed by Beijing.

    The rampant demonization of China, now a bipartisan sport across the Beltway, on occasion even more hysterical than the demonization of Russia, also features proverbial reports by the Council on Foreign Relations – the establishment’s think tank by definition – on China as a serial aggressor, politically, economically and militarily, and BRI as a geoeconomic tool to coerce China’s neighbors.

    So it’s no wonder this state of affairs has led Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on a recent, frenetic Indo-Pacific related tour, including Quad members India and Japan and possible associates Saudi Arabia, UAE and South Korea.

    Geopoliticians of the realist school do fear that Pompeo, a fanatic Christian Zionist, may be enjoying under Trump a virtual monopoly on US foreign policy; a former CIA director playing warmongering top “diplomat” while also “acting” as Pentagon head trampling other second string actors who are not under full employment.

    His Indo-Pacific roving was a de facto tour de force emphasizing the containment/demonization not only of China but also Iran, which should be seen as the major US target in the Indo/Southwest Asia part of the club. Iran is not only about strategic positioning and being a major BRI hub; it’s about immense reserves of natural gas to be traded bypassing the US dollar.

    The fact that the non-stop demonization of Iran and/or China “aggression” comes from a hyperpower with over 800 military bases or lily pads spread out across every latitude plus a FONOP armada patrolling the seven seas is enough to send the hardest cynic into a paroxysm of laughter.

    The high-speed train has left the station

    In the end, everything under “Indo-Pacific” goes back to what game India is playing.

    New Delhi meekly opted for not buying oil from Iran after the Trump administration lifted its sanctions waiver. New Delhi had promised earlier, on the record, to only respect UN Security Council sanctions, not unilateral – and illegal – US sanctions.

    This decision is set to jeopardize India’s dream of extending its new mini-Silk Road to Afghanistan and Central Asia based on the Iranian port of Chabahar. That was certainly part of the discussions during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Bishkek, when full members Putin, Xi and Modi, plus Rouhani – as the head of an observer nation – were sitting at the same table.

    New Delhi’s priority – embedded deep in the Indian establishment – may be containment of China. Yet Putin and Xi – fellow BRICS and SCO members – are very much aware that Modi cannot at the same time antagonize China and lose Iran as partner, and are deftly working on it.

    On the Eurasian chessboard, the Pentagon and the Trump administration, together, only think Divide and Rule. India must become a naval power capable of containing China in the Indian Ocean while Japan must contain China economically and militarily all across East Asia.

    Japan and India do meet – again – when it comes to another more geoeconomically specific anti-BRI scheme; the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), which so far has had a minimal impact and stands no chance of luring dozens of nations across the Global South away from BRI-related projects.

    The chessboard now clearly shows Indo-Pacific pitted against the three key hubs of Eurasia integration – Russia-China-Iran. The definitive unraveling of Indo-Pacific – even before it starts gaining ground – would be a clear commitment by New Delhi to break apart the US sanctions regime by restarting purchases of much-needed Iran oil and gas.

    It won’t take much for Modi to figure out that taking a second role in a Made in USA production will leave him stranded at the station eating dust just as the high-speed Eurasia integration train passes him by.

    *  *  *

    Full Report below:

  • Powell Testimony Preview: What The Fed Chair May Say Tomorrow

    Chair Powell is slated to give his semi-annual testimony before the House Financial Services and Senate Banking Committees on Wednesday and Thursday, respectively. His prepared remarks will be released at 8:30 am Eastern on Wednesday morning. As per the usual with these hearings, Powell will be testifying on behalf of the FOMC. Consequently, as Deutsche Bank’s Matthew Luzzetti notes, his prepared remarks and the overall tone from his testimony, should largely adhere to the message from – and the intricacies of – the discussion at the June FOMC meeting, the full details of which will be revealed with the release of the minutes to this meeting later on Wednesday.

    That said, there have been a few developments since the June FOMC meeting that could give Powell an opportunity to update the Committee’s views in important ways. Two events stand out in particular.

    • One, the G-20 meeting resulted in at least a near-term truce and a possible pathway towards the resumption of trade negotiations between the US and China. While this outcome avoided the worst-case scenario of a breakdown in talks and escalation that includes additional tariffs, it did little to alleviate the uncertainty that Fed officials believe is contributing to cooling momentum in global trade and domestic capex plans, as last week’s Monetary Policy Report made clear. As a result, Powell will likely stick with a cautious line on the impact of these developments on the US outlook, likely noting, as San Francisco Fed President Daly did recently, that failure to remove trade uncertainty will continue to act as a headwind to US growth.
    • The second important development since the last FOMC meeting was the June jobs report, which we have argued featured details that were considerably weaker than the robust headline payroll figures indicate, particularly related to growth in hours worked and aggregate incomes. The June 19 FOMC statement noted that “job gains have been solid, on average, in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low.” Powell is likely to reiterate this relatively upbeat assessment of the labor market following the latest jobs data. However, if questioned more closely about the underlying details, we would not be surprised if he were to sound a mild note of caution about the recent downshift in hours worked, particularly in the context of softer wage inflation. Powell also may provide an update on the progress of the Fed’s policy review, a common theme of which has been the benefits of running a tight labor market.

    With respect to inflation, it is important to recall what Chair Powell stated in his post-meeting press conference last month: “Wages are rising…but not at a pace that would provide much upward impetus for inflation. Moreover, weaker global growth may continue to hold inflation down around the world…and we are well aware that inflation weakness that persists even in a healthy economy could precipitate a difficult to arrest downward drift in longer-run inflation expectations.” This statement details the case for undertaking preemptive rate cuts. On this point, market-based measures of inflation expectations have remained soft and the latest University of Michigan survey showed long-term inflation expectations at all-time lows. With global growth indicators remaining weak, this assessment should remain unchanged, even with some modest upward revisions to core PCE inflation since the June FOMC meeting.

    In short, many analysts, and Deutsche Bank in particular, don’t expect Chair Powell to tip his hand with respect to the July meeting but rather reiterating the same concerns the Committee highlighted on June 19. If this expectation proves correct, market pricing for a 25bp rate cut at the July FOMC meeting should remain entrenched.

    If, however, in a surprising turn Fed leadership has conviction that they will not cut at the July meeting, Powell will need to begin laying the groundwork for this hawkish message. With the  blackout period commencing the following week, and given the FOMC’s penchant for not surprising in a hawkish direction, they should want to soon plant the hawkish seed if that is in fact the direction they are leaning.

    MARKET PRICING:

    A solid Employment resulted in a significant paring back in the implied probabilities of a 50bps rate cut at the Fed’s July meeting – to just 3.5% from around 27% before the data, though the market is still completely priced for a 25bps cut; money markets now price 61bps of easing through the end of the year, compared to 75bps at the close of business last Thursday (the day before the payrolls report). Some analysts say the real question is not whether the FOMC cuts rates by 25bps or 50bps at the July meeting, but what happens afterwards. Societe Generale notes that before the (weak) jobs data at the start of June, the market was pricing a 40% probability that rates would still be above 2% at the end of 2019, now however, the market is assigning a mere 11% chance, though that has been edging up slightly post-payrolls.

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