- Britain's Biggest Home Improvement Chain May Dump Monsanto's "Roundup" After Cancer Lawsuit
One of the UK’s largest home improvement chains, Homebase, is considering dropping Monsanto’s Roundup line of weedkiller products amid growing concern over their use, after a California jury awarded dying former school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson $289 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging Roundup caused his advanced stage cancer.
The manufacturer of the weedkiller, Monsanto, has insisted that British consumers are safe to continue using Roundup products, which are widely sold at DIY stores and used by British farmers. But a spokesperson for Homebase said it would be reviewing its product range after the ruling in California.
A spokesperson for B&Q said it had already been undertaking a broader review of all garden products in an attempt to manage the range responsibly. –The Guardian
Johnson, a 46-year-old father of two sued the agrochemical giant, claiming his non-Hodgkins lymphoma was triggered by Roundup and Ranger Pro, a similar glyphosate herbicide that he applied up to 30 times per year.
In finding for the Johnson, who has months to live, the jury found that Monsanto had “acted with malice or oppression,” and should have known the weedkiller was a danger.
In 2007, California added Roundup to a list of cancer-causing herbicides, requiring Monsanto to add a warning label to their packaging.
Monsanto says it will appeal the verdict.
“Today’s decision does not change the fact that more than 800 scientific studies and reviews — and conclusions by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and regulatory authorities around the world — support the fact that glyphosate does not cause cancer, and did not cause Mr. Johnson’s cancer,” Monsanto Vice President Scott Partridge said in a statement.
Monsanto is a subsidiary of Germany’s Bayer AG, which closed on its $66 billion purchase of the agrochemical company in June.
On Tuesday, Johnson’s attorney Brent Wisner urged jurors to hold Monsanto liable and slap them with a verdict that would “actually change the world” – after arguing that Monsanto knew about glyphosate’s risks of cancer, but decided to ignore and bury the information.
The German pharmaceutical group Bayer, which owns Monsanto, said: “Bayer is confident, based on the strength of the science, the conclusions of regulators around the world and decades of experience, that glyphosate is safe for use and does not cause cancer when used according to the label.”
The scientific world, however, has raised doubts about glyphosate. A ruling in 2015 by the World Health Organization’s international agency for research on cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans”. –The Guardian
“This is a landmark case, which highlights not only the problems caused by glyphosate, but also the whole system of pesticide use. We need to urgently change our systems of weed control to stop relying on herbicides,” said Emma Hockridge, head of policy at the UK’s soil association, who described the Monsanto ruling as a “dramatic blow” to the pesticide industry.
The UK’s National Farmers’ Union, on the other hand, doesn’t believe the use of the pesticide should be reviewed following the CA court’s decision.
“We’re in the same place as when they ruled it was safe to use. We don’t think the opinion of a Californian jury should change that,” said The NFU’s deputy president, Guy Smith – an active livestock and arable farmer.
“Its most common use in UK farming is to kill weeds in the autumn before seeds are planted. On my land right now, I’m spraying it today. Without glyphosate, I would have to plough and cultivate the land. That would use extra diesel, which is bad for the soil and the environment.”
- Is The Swedish Government Funding Anti-Semitism?
Authored by Nima Gholam Ali Pour via The Gatestone Institute,
As major Swedish cities such as Malmö have become known as places where Jews are threatened, anti-Semitism in Sweden has attracted international attention. Does Sweden, however, really deserve this bad reputation or is there some misunderstanding?
In December 2017, when US President Donald J. Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, demonstrations broke out in Malmö. Protesters, often people with an Arab background, shouted, “We want our freedom back and we’re going to shoot the Jews”, and a chapel at the Jewish cemetery was attacked with firebombs. In Gothenburg, the city’s synagogue was also attacked with firebombs.
The synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden was firebombed on December 9, 2017. (Image source: Lintoncat/Wikimedia Commons)
The local newspaper in Malmö, Kvällsposten, described how the Jewish congregation in Malmö — not Israelis; Swedish Jews — tries to protect itself:
“At the synagogue in Malmö, the Jewish congregation has set up poles to prevent attacks with vehicles. In addition, the building is protected by a high fence around the building. The area has been guarded for a long time by the police. As soon as the congregation holds a service, the premises are guarded by the police.”
One could fairly say that the Jews in Malmö are under siege. Reports also note that Jews in Malmö cannot wear any Jewish symbols in public without the risk of being attacked.
Only the most brazen and explicit anti-Semitic acts are reported by the Swedish media. Many organizations that spread implicit anti-Semitism receive no attention from either the Swedish media or the so-called “anti-racist” movements. The group Youth Against Settlements (YAS), for example, which has its base in Hebron, visits high schools and holds lectures in Sweden, and is conducting a campaign against the Jewish residents of Hebron. One student described what was said when YAS visited the Glokala Folkhögskolan school in Malmö on February 28, 2018:
“They talked about there being checkpoints everywhere in the country [Israel] and that Arabs are constantly being stopped and beaten down, killed. They also said that the Palestinians lived in concentration camps, kind of like the Second World War. And that Israel sees and hears everything. Like they had cameras everywhere and observed everything. I mean there was a lot of bullshit that they said. Towards the end, everybody was forced to take pictures with their flag. I had to pretend to go to the bathroom to avoid it. Really sick!”
Another student said about the YAS visit:
“The most controversial thing that was mentioned was that Jews control the United States and the media.”
These interviews with the students were conducted by a Swedish blogger, Tobias Petersson, who published them on his blog. That public high schools received visits from an organization that demonizes Israel and makes false and outrageous anti-Semitic statements should, at the very least, have been investigated by the media. But the Swedish media ignored the defamation and neither verified nor repudiated the information.
Instead, the two individuals who represented YAS and were touring in Sweden, Zleikha Al Muhtaseb and Anas Amro, were described as “peace activists”. On their Facebook pages, however, knife attacks, martyrdom and intifada are celebrated. YAS also supported the recent riots at the border between Israel and Gaza, despite these riots having led to more Palestinians being killed, worsening the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and having been organized by Hamas, an anti-Semitic terrorist organization that outspokenly seeks to destroy Israel.
YAS was invited to hold lectures for public institutions in Sweden; and the foreign minister of Sweden, Margot Wallström, met with YAS when she visited Ramallah in December 2016. As such, YAS became an organization legitimized by the Swedish government. When organizations such as YAS visit Sweden and are received unquestioningly, with open arms, by high schools and other public institutions, this kind of welcome legitimizes the type of anti-Semitism that is presented, no matter how false, as a supposedly reliable view of Israel.
Another organization that clearly has anti-Semitic tendencies and is supported by public institutions in Sweden is Group 194. Its name, which derives from United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, adopted on December 11, 1948, during the 1948-49 Arab-Israeli War that followed the founding of Israel. Resolution 194 says, among other things:
“…the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible…”
The resolution is used by many Palestinians to try to prove international recognition of a “right to return” to what is today the heartland of Israel, to erase Israel, as maps of “Palestine” openly display, and ostensibly to reclaim homes that 70 years later are likely no longer there.
Group 194, a pro-Palestinian political organization, has close ties with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), a terrorist group that has murdered at least 36 Israeli civilians, and which supports the Assad regime in Syria. That is why it seemed strange when the Labor and Social Services Board of the Municipality of Malmö, on October 27, 2017 granted 132,000 kronor (roughly $15,000) to Group 194 and two other organizations, so they could patrol the suburb of Rosengård at night, supposedly in order to make the area safe. For full disclosure, the author, as a member of this municipal board, and a few of his fellow party colleagues voted against this proposal; the majority of the board, however, supported it. Today, it is a fact that pro-Palestinian organizations are funded by the municipality of Malmö.
Group 194 supports violent extremism. On their Facebook page one can see pictures of minors holding Kalashnikov rifles. There also have been anti-Semitic images on Group 194’s Facebook page, such as a defamatory cartoon portraying a Jew drinking blood and eating a child.
Why does the municipality of Malmö support such an organization with taxpayers’ money? The reason is that Malmö and Sweden have serious problems in dealing with imported, Middle Eastern anti-Semitism. When Swedish politicians — because of ignorance or tolerance for intolerant behavior — accept anti-Semitism in an important Swedish city as Malmö, that is an unacceptable problem. It is also unacceptable when a majority of local politicians in Sweden’s third-largest city support taxpayer money going to a pro-Palestinian organization that has made anti-Semitic statements and promoted violence. It reveals that too many Swedish politicians apparently cannot even recognize what anti-Semitism looks like and when and how to take a stand against it. What are Swedish Jews to think?
Group 194 was also given an award by the municipality of Malmö at a gala it organized, and has received contributions from various municipalities in Sweden for several years, including Sundsvall and Landskrona, where the municipality has a close cooperation with Group 194. When Landskrona had its official summer party, one of its organizers was Group 194.
Ship To Gaza is an organization that usually gets a lot of media publicity. When one of its activists, Ferry Saarposhan, stated that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “is worse than the Holocaust,” the Swedish media stayed silent. The video clip of his statement is posted on the official Facebook page of Ship to Gaza-Sweden, a page that has more than 35,000 “likes”. But no one has yet responded to his slander.
Different factors end up reinforcing each other, as this author has already noted. They create an echo chamber that then leads to a situation where Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism becomes accepted by Swedish authorities. These factors include:
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Large-scale immigration from countries where anti-Semitism is normalized.
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A strong pro-Palestinian engagement among Swedish politicians that has resulted in a totally inaccurate and surreal debate about the Israel-Palestine conflict, in which Israel is unjustly demonized.
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A desire among political parties in Sweden to win the votes of immigrants.
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A Swedish multiculturalism that is so uncritical of foreign cultures that it cannot differentiate between culture and racism.
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A fear of sounding critical of immigration.
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Important Swedish institutions, such as the Church of Sweden, legitimizing anti-Semitism by endorsing the counter-factual Kairos Palestine document.
Today this process has gone so far that many in Sweden seem to have totally internalized this imported, Middle Eastern anti-Semitism and made it an integral part of their ideology.
Today in Sweden, supporting organizations that demonize Israel and spread anti-Semitism is considered completely normal. It is not even the subject of discussion — unless an extreme statement is uttered. Oldoz Javidi, a parliamentary candidate for the feminist party, Feminist Initiative, for instance, said that all Israeli Jews should move to the United States so “the Palestinians can live in peace and rebuild the country that once was theirs”. Only after the Times of Israel and other non-Swedish media outlets wrote articles about this incident did some Swedish mainstream media outlets start writing about the incident and describe the candidate’s statements as anti-Semitic. The criticism from Swedish media outlets forced Javidi to withdraw her candidacy.
When it comes to confronting imported Middle Eastern anti-Semitism, there seems to be simply a fear of conflict, and especially of being called “racist” or “anti-immigrant.” These fears seem to lead at best to a wish to try to paper over problems by holding “dialogues” to find “compromises.”
In August 2017, Bassem Nasr, a representative for the Green Party in Malmö’s municipal council, wrote an op-ed that criticized anti-Semitism within pro-Palestinian organizations. Strangely enough, Nasr was embraced by the Swedish establishment, which often brands anyone who criticizes Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism as racists.
Nasr, however, has a history that the media failed to mention. In 2006, he invitedthe anti-Semitic terrorist organization Hamas to Malmö. The visit never took place, only because one of the Hamas representatives was denied a visa to enter Europe. Nasr, however, never explained why he invited Hamas representatives in the first place; he never even apologized.
In 2008, Bassem Nasr wrote — incorrectly — in an op-ed:
“The fact is that there is no Israeli prime minister throughout history that has had so little blood on his hands as the Iranian president.”
At the time Nasr made this statement, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denied that the Holocaust ever happened, was president of Iran. The fact that Iran is an Islamist dictatorship and second only to China for most executions in the world — and even executes minors — makes Nasr’s statement even more bizarre.
What seemed to have suited the Swedish establishment was that Nasr had no suggestions on how to counter anti-Semitism in Malmö and Sweden, except that it was “the task of the teachers”. That Nasr had once invited Hamas to Malmö and been active in pro-Palestinian organizations for several years evidently created the feeling of comfortable, non-confrontational “dialogue” that many policy-makers in Sweden seem to imagine can fight anti-Semitism.
One source of Middle Eastern anti-Semitism is the messages that come from Sweden’s mosques. In April 2017, a mosque in the Swedish city of Borås invited a speaker who had been convicted in Germany for calling for the murder of Jews. In July 2017, an imam at a mosque in the Swedish city of Helsingborg said that Jews were the descendants of apes and pigs.
When the government, after several scandals related to extremism in Muslim religious communities, wanted to investigate the criteria for financial support from the state, Ulf Bjereld, who has a history of defending Islamists in different contexts, was appointed to head the investigation. Bjereld is also chairman of the Religious Social Democrats of Sweden. This organization has been criticizedseveral times for excusing and legitimizing anti-Semitism, and is part of the Social Democratic Party — Sweden’s governing party.
Appointing someone such as Bjereld for this investigation shows that the Sweden’s national and local governments are not ready to confront Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, but would much rather have a nice, quiet “dialogue” about it.
In Sweden, imported Middle Eastern anti-Semitism is funded by taxpayer money, so when scandals occur, they are often addressed by the same people who have participated in spreading its message.
No effective actions are currently being taken against the spread of anti-Semitism in Sweden.
In December 2017, this author submitted a motion to the Malmö municipal council to map and analyze anti-Semitism in the city. It is a measure that would give the politicians a clear picture of why anti-Semitism has increased there, so that corrective measures could be taken. But this proposal is unpopular, because such an analysis of anti-Semitism in Malmö would force the authorities to realize that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism is a huge problem.
Just as European anti-Semitism was defeated by rejecting and condemning the ideology after World War II and isolating its proponents, so must Sweden’s “new” anti-Semitism be defeated by isolating its advocates and marginalizing all organizations spreading its ideas. This means that all direct and indirect government funding of these organizations has to end. As long as this does not happen, Jews in Sweden will continue living in fear and insecurity.
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- Turkish State Media Exposes The American Empire & Its Media
Amid growing diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Turkey, Turkish TV station ‘A Haber’ on Saturday presented a detailed segment on ‘The American Empire and its Media’, based on an infographic tweeted out earlier this year by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and showing the surprisingly close interrelations between U.S. mainstream media and key foreign policy institutions.
Fox TV kimin kontrolünde?@abdullahciftcib @arkaplanahaber pic.twitter.com/Wb0b0boQDb
— A Haber (@tvahaber) August 11, 2018
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
This anti-American propaganda (if that is what one calls a foreign nation daring to expose the truth about America), comes in the wake of various speeches and after Erdogan wrote a Friday New York Times op-ed cataloging his grievances and threatening to walk away from the decades-old alliance. “Failure to reverse this trend of unilateralism and disrespect will require us to start looking for new friends and allies,” he wrote. Meanwhile, while announcing the new sanctions aimed at Turkey, Trump tweeted his “analysis” of the situation: “Our relations with Turkey are not good at this time!”
The escalating war of words continued all weekend, when speaking at a rally in the Black Sea town of Unye, Erdogan said that “it is wrong to dare bring Turkey to its knees through threats over a pastor,” and blasted “shame on you, shame on you. You are exchanging your strategic partner in NATO for a priest.” At the same time, Ibrahim Kalin, Erdogan’s spokesman, said that the U.S. is “facing the risk of completely losing Turkey.”
And if anyone was hoping that Erdogan’s temper would have cooled one day later with just hours left before FX markets reopen, they were sorely disappointed on Sunday when in his latest public address in the town of Trabzon, Erdogan doubled down on his belligerent rhetoric against the US once again, via Bloomberg:
- ERDOGAN: WE SEE THE GAME YOU’RE PLAYING; WE DARE YOU
- ERDOGAN: THEY’RE TRYING W/ MONEY WHAT THEY COULDN’T DO IN COUP
Here one assumes that by “they” Erdogan was referring to the US, even though the Turkish’s president official line all along was that the culprit behind the “failed coup” was the exiled cleric Fethulah Gullen who has been accused by Erodgan of being behind the country’s imaginary “shadow state” for years, and which gave Erdogan a green light to crackdown on any potential opponents, leading to an unprecedented purge of people in public positions, with tens of thousands of government workers either ending up in prison or unemployed.
Erdogan then continued by calling for all Turks to convert their foreign currency holdings, i.e. mostly dollars, to liras, and warning that “economic attacks will only increase Turkey’s unity.”
Among the other notable highlights, Erdogan said that “we will say bye-bye to those who are ready to give up their strategic partnership for their relations with terror organizations” and that Turkey can “respond to those who started a trade war against the entire world and included our country in it by gravitating towards new co-operations, new alliances” i.e. China and Russia (which earlier today said it was considering dropping the US dollar altogether in oil trade), and warned that “it is foolish to think that Turkey can be thrown off by FX” although with inflation set to explode as the currency collapses, the local population may have a different view of this.
Finally, anyone wondering which way the Lira will open later today, Erdogan did his best to make the ongoing collapse accelerate, stating that “we know very well that those who say we should make an agreement with the IMF are saying we should give up on political independence“, thus eliminating the possibility of an IMF bailout which together with capital controls were the only two options Turkey had left to arrest the lira’s plunge.
As for higher interest rates, a critical requirement to at least slow down the country’s economic descent, Erdogan had some words as well:
“They are trying to do with money what they couldn’t with provocations and the coup. This is clearly called an economic war”
“Interest rates are tools of exploitation that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. As long as I’m alive, we will not fall into the interest-rate trap”
And the punchline:
- ERDOGAN SAYS READY TO RESPOND W NEW FINANCIAL TOOLS VS DOLLAR
It was not clear what those tools would be, but they certainly would not be welcome by the market.
* * *
Here is the original detail that Erdogan is now increasingly highlighting as he uses Trump as the scapegoat for his economy’s collapse.
Via Swiss Propaganda Research,
Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.
Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group(covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.
In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.
Harwood continued:
“The membership of these journalists in the Council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it.
They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views.”
However, media personalities constitute only about five percent of the overall CFR network. As the following illustration shows, key members of the private Council on Foreign Relations have included:
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several U.S. Presidents and Vice Presidents of both parties;
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almost all Secretaries of State, Defense, and the Treasury;
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many high-ranking commanders of the U.S. military and NATO;
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almost all National Security Advisors, CIA Directors, Ambassadors to the U.N., Chairs of the Federal Reserve, Presidents of the World Bank, and Directors of the National Economic Council;
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some of the most influential Members of Congress (notably in foreign & security policy matters);
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many top jounalists, media executives, and entertainment industry directors;
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many prominent academics, especially in key fields such as Economics, International Relations, Political Science, History, and Journalism;
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many top executives of Wall Street, policy think tanks, universities, and NGOs;
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as well as the key members of both the 9/11 Commission and the Warren Commission (JFK)
Eminent economist and Kennedy supporter, John K. Galbraith, confirmed the Council’s influence: “Those of us who had worked for the Kennedy election were tolerated in the government for that reason and had a say, but foreign policy was still with the Council on Foreign Relations people.”
And no less than John J. McCloy, the longtime chairman of the Council and advisor to nine U.S. presidents, told the New York Times about his time in Washington: “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of the Council members and put through a call to New York.”
German news magazine Der Spiegel once described the CFR as the “most influential private institution of the United States and the Western world“ and a “politburo of capitalism”. Both the Roman-inspired logo of the Council (top right in the illustration above) as well as its slogan (ubique – omnipresent) appear to emphasize that ambition.
In his famous article about “The American Establishment”, political columnist Richard H. Rovere noted:
“The directors of the CFR make up a sort of Presidium for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation.
[I]t rarely fails to get one of its members, or at least one of its allies, into the White House. In fact, it generally is able to see to it that both nominees are men acceptable to it.”
Until recently, this assessment had indeed been justified. Thus, in 1993 former CFR director George H.W. Bush was followed by CFR member Bill Clinton, who in turn was followed by CFR “family member” George W. Bush. In 2008, CFR member John McCain lost against CFR candidate of choice, Barack Obama, who received the names of his entire Cabinet already one month prior to his election by CFR Senior Fellow (and Citigroup banker) Michael Froman. Froman later negotiated the TTP and TTIP free trade agreements, before returning to the CFR as a Distinguished Fellow.
It was not until the 2016 election that the Council couldn’t, apparently, prevail. At any rate, not yet.
- The Real Reason Why Trump Cancelled The Iran Deal
Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The following is entirely from open online sources that I have been finding to be trustworthy on these matters in the past. These sources will be linked-to here; none of this information is secret, even though some details in my resulting analysis of it will be entirely new.
It explains how and why the bottom-line difference between Donald Trump and Barack Obama, regarding US national security policies, turns out to be their different respective estimations of the biggest danger threatening the maintenance of the US dollar as the world’s leading or reserve currency. This has been the overriding foreign-policy concern for both Presidents.
Obama placed as being the top threat to the dollar, a breakaway of the EU (America’s largest market both for exports and for imports) from alliance with the United States. He was internationally a Europhile. Trump, however, places as being the top threat to the dollar, a breakaway of Saudi Arabia and of the other Gulf Arab oil monarchies from the U.S. Trump is internationally a Sunni-phile: specifically a protector of fundamentalist Sunni monarchs — but especially of the Sauds themselves — and they hate Shia and especially the main Shia nation, Iran.
Here’s how that change, to Saudi Arabia as being America’s main ally, has happened — actually it’s a culmination of decades. Trump is merely the latest part of that process of change. Here is from the US State Department’s official historian, regarding this history:
By the 1960s, a surplus of US dollars caused by foreign aid, military spending, and foreign investment threatened this system [the FDR-established 1944 Bretton Woods gold-based US dollar as the world’s reserve currency], as the United States did not have enough gold to cover the volume of dollars in worldwide circulation at the rate of $35 per ounce; as a result, the dollar was overvalued. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson adopted a series of measures to support the dollar and sustain Bretton Woods: foreign investment disincentives; restrictions on foreign lending; efforts to stem the official outflow of dollars; international monetary reform; and cooperation with other countries. Nothing worked. Meanwhile, traders in foreign exchange markets, believing that the dollar’s overvaluation would one day compel the US government to devalue it, proved increasingly inclined to sell dollars. This resulted in periodic runs on the dollar.
It was just such a run on the dollar, along with mounting evidence that the overvalued dollar was undermining the nation’s foreign trading position, which prompted President Richard M. Nixon to act, on August 13, 1971 [to end the convertibility of dollars to gold].
When Nixon ended the gold-basis of the dollar and then in 1974 secretly switched to the current oil-basis, this transformation of the dollar’s backing, from gold to oil, was intended to enable the debt-financing (as opposed to the tax-financing, which is less acceptable to voters) of whatever military expenditure would be necessary in order to satisfy the profit-needs of Lockheed Corporation and of the other US manufacturers whose only markets are the US Government and its allied governments, as well as of US extractive industries such as oil and mining firms, which rely heavily upon access to foreign natural resources, as well as of Wall Street and its need for selling debt and keeping interest-rates down (and stock-prices — and therefore aristocrats’ wealth — high and rtising). This 1974 secret agreement between Nixon and King Saud lasts to the present day, and has worked well for both aristocracies. It met the needs of the very same “military-industrial complex” (the big US Government contractors) that the prior Republican President, Dwight Eisenhower, had warned might take control of US foreign policies. As Bloomberg’s Andrea Wong on 30 May 2016 explained the Nixon system that replaced the FDR system, “The basic framework was strikingly simple. The US would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.”
This new system didn’t only supply a constant flow of Saudi tax-money to the US Government; it supplied a constant flow of new sales-orders and profits to the military firms that were increasingly coming to control the US Government — for the benefit of both aristocracies: the Sauds, and America’s billionaires.
That was near the end of the FDR-produced 37-year period of US democratic leadership of the world, the era that had started at Bretton Woods in 1944. It came crashing to an end not in 1974 (which was step two after the 1971 step one had ended the 1944 system) but on the day when Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981. The shockingly sudden ascent, from that moment on, of US federal Government debt (to be paid-off by future generations instead of by current taxpayers) is shown, right here, in a graph of “US Federal Debt as Percent of GDP, 1940-2015”, where you can see that the debt had peaked above 90% of GDP late in WW II between 1944-1948, and then plunged during Bretton Woods, but in 1981 it started ascending yet again, until reaching that WW II peak for a second time, as it has been ever since 2010, when Obama bailed-out the mega-banks and their mega-clients, but didn’t bail out the American public, whose finances had been destroyed by those banksters’ frauds, which Obama refused to prosecute; and, so, economic inequality in America got even more extreme after the 2008 George W. Bush crash, instead of less extreme afterward (as had always happened in the past).
Above 90% debt/GDP during and immediately following WW II was sound policy, but America’s going again above 90% since 2010 has reflected simply an aristocratic heist of America, for only the aristocracy’s benefit — all of the benefits going only to the super-rich.
Another, and more-current US graph shows that, as of the first quarter of 2018, this percentage (debt/GDP) is, yet again, back now to its previous all-time record high of 105-120%%, which had been reached only in 1945-1947 (when it was justified by the war).
Currently, companies such as Lockheed Martin are thriving as they had done during WW II, but the sheer corruption in America’s military spending is this time the reason, no World War (yet); so, this time, America is spending like in an all-out-war situation, even before the Congress has issued any declaration of war at all. Everybody except the American public knows that the intense corruptness of the US military is the reason for this restoration of astronomical ‘defense’ spending, even during peace-time. A major poll even showed that ‘defense’ spending was the only spending by the federal Government which Americans in 2017 wanted increased; they wanted all other federal spending to be reduced (though there was actually vastly more corruption in military spending than in any other type — the public have simply been hoodwinked).
But can the US Government’s extreme misallocation of wealth, from the public to the insiders, continue without turning this country into a much bigger version of today’s Greece? More and more people around the world are worrying about that. Of course, Greece didn’t have the world’s reserve currency, but what would happen to the net worths of America’s billionaires if billionaires worldwide were to lose faith in the dollar? Consequently, there’s intensified Presidential worrying about how much longer foreign investors will continue to trust the oil-based dollar.
America’s political class now have two competing ideas to deal with this danger, Obama’s versus Trump’s, both being about how to preserve the dollar in a way that best serves the needs of ‘defense’ contractors, extractive firms, and Wall Street. Obama chose Europe (America’s largest market) as America’s chief ally (he was Euro-centric against Russia); Trump chose the owner of Saudi Arabia (he’s Saudi-Israeli centric against Iran) — that’s the world’s largest weapons-purchaser, as well as the world’s largest producer of oil (as well as the largest lobbies).
The Saudi King owns Saudi Arabia, including the world’s largest and most valuable oil company, Aramco, whose oil is the “sweetest” — the least expensive to extract and refine — and is also the most abundant, in all of the world, and so he can sell petroleum at a profit even when his competitors cannot. Oil-prices that are so low as to cause economic losses for other oil companies, can still be generating profits — albeit lowered ones — for King Saud; and this is the reason why his decisions determine how much the global oil-spigot will be turned on, and how low the global oil-price will be, at any given time. He controls the value of the US dollar. He controls it far more directly, and far more effectively, than the EU can. It would be like, under the old FDR-era Bretton Woods system, controlling the exchange-rates of the dollar, by raising or lowering the amount of gold produced. But this is liquid gold, and King Saud determines its price.
Furthermore, King Saud also leads the Gulf Cooperation Council of all other Arab oil monarchs, such as those who own UAE — all of them are likewise US allies and major weapons-buyers.
In an extraordinarily fine recent article by Pepe Escobar at Asia Times, “Oil and gas geopolitics: no shelter from the storm”, he quotes from his not-for-attribution interviews with “EU diplomats,” and reports:
After the Trump administration’s unilateral pull-out from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), European Union diplomats in Brussels, off the record, and still in shock, admit that they blundered by not “configuring the eurozone as distinct and separate to the dollar hegemony”. Now they may be made to pay the price of their impotence via their “outlawed” trade with Iran. …
As admitted, never on the record, by experts in Brussels; the EU has got to reevaluate its strategic alliance with an essentially energy independent US, as “we are risking all our energy resources over their Halford Mackinder geopolitical analysis that they must break up [the alliance between] Russia and China.”
That’s a direct reference to the late Mackinder epigone Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski, who died dreaming of turning China against Russia.
In Brussels, there’s increased recognition that US pressure on Iran, Russia and China is out of geopolitical fear the entire Eurasian land mass, organized as a super-trading bloc via the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), [and] the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), is slipping away from Washington’s influence.
This analysis gets closer to how the three key nodes of 21st century Eurasia integration – Russia, China and Iran – have identified the key issue; both the euro and the yuan must bypass the petrodollar, the ideal means, as the Chinese stress, to “end the oscillation between strong and weak dollar cycles, which has been so profitable for US financial institutions, but lethal to emerging markets.” …
It’s also no secret among Persian Gulf traders that in the – hopefully unlikely – event of a US-Saudi-Israeli war in Southwest Asia against Iran, a real scenario war-gamed by the Pentagon would be “the destruction of oil wells in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council]. The Strait of Hormuz does not have to be blocked, as destroying the oil wells would be far more effective.”
And what the potential loss of over 20% of the world’s oil supply would mean is terrifying; the implosion, with unforeseen consequences, of the quadrillion derivatives pyramid, and consequentially [consequently] of the entire Western financial casino superstructure.
In other words: it’s not the ‘threat’ that perhaps, some day, Iran will have nuclear warheads, that is actually driving Trump’s concern here (despite what Israel’s concerns are about that matter), but instead, it is his concerns about Iran’s missiles, which constitute the delivery-system for any Iranian warheads: that their flight-range be short enough so that the Sauds will be outside their range. (The main way Iran intends to respond to an invasion backed by the US, is to attack Saudi Arabia — Iran’s leaders know that the US Government is more dependent upon the Sauds than upon Israel — so, Iran’s top targets would be Saudi capital Riyadh, and also the Ghawar oil field, which holds over half of Saudi oil. If US bases have been used in the invasion, then all US bases in the Middle East are also be within the range of Iran’s missiles and therefore would also probably be targeted.)
Obama’s deal with Iran had focused solely upon preventing Iran from developing nuclear warheads — which Obama perhaps thought (mistakenly) would dampen Israel’s (and its billionaire US financial backers’) ardor for the US to conquer Iran. Israel had publicly said that their concern was Iran’s possibility to become a nuclear power like Israel became; those possible future warheads were supposed to be the issue; but, apparently, that wasn’t actually the issue which really drove Israel. Obama seems to have thought that it was, but it wasn’t, actually. Israel, like the Sauds, want Iran conquered. Simple. The nuclear matter was more an excuse than an explanation.
With Trump now in the White House, overwhelmingly by money from the Israel lobbies (proxies also for the Sauds) — and with no equivalently organized Jewish opposition to the pro-Israel lobbies (and so in the United States, for a person to be anti-Israel is viewed as being anti-Semitic, which is not at all true, but Israel’s lies say it’s true and many Americans unfortunately believe it) — Trump has not only the Sauds and their allies requiring him to be against Iran and its allies, but he has also got this pressure coming from Israel: both the Big-Oil and the Jewish lobbies drive him. Unlike Obama, who wasn’t as indebted to the Jewish lobbies, Trump needs to walk the plank for both the Sauds and Israel.
In other words: Trump aims to keep the dollar as the reserve currency by suppressing not only China but also the two main competitors of King Saud: Iran and Russia. That’s why America’s main ‘enemies’ now are those three countries and their respective allies.
Obama was likewise targeting them, but in a different priority-order, with Russia being the main one (thus Obama’s takeover of Ukraine in February 2014 turning it against Russia, next door); and that difference was due to Obama’s desire to be favorably viewed by the residents in America’s biggest export and import market, the EU, and so his bringing another member (Ukraine) into the EU (which still hasn’t yet been culminated).
Trump is instead building on his alliance with King Saud and the other GCC monarchs, a group who can more directly cooperate to control the value of the US dollar than the EU can. Furthermore, both conservative (including Orthodox) Jews in the United States, and also white evangelical Protestants in the US, are strongly supportive of Israel, which likewise sides with the Arab oil monarchs against Iran and its allies. Trump needs these people’s votes.
Trump also sides with the Sauds against Canada. That’s a matter which the theorists who assert that Israel controls the US, instead of that the Sauds (allied with America’s and Israel’s billionaires) control the US, ignore; they ignore whatever doesn’t fit their theory. Of course, a lot doesn’t fit their theory (which equates “Jews” with “Israelis” and alleges that “they” control the world), but people whose prejudices are that deep-seated, can’t be reached by any facts which contradict their self-defining prejudice. Since it defines themselves, it’s a part of them, and they can never deny it, because to do so would be to deny who and what they are, and they refuse to change that. The Sauds control the dollar; Israel does not, but Israel does the lobbying, and both the Sauds and Israel want Iran destroyed. Trump gets this pressure not only from the billionaires but from his voters.
And, of course, Democratic Party billionaires push the narrative that Russia controls America. It used to be the Republican Joseph R. McCarthy’s accusation, that the “commies” had “infiltrated”, especially at the State Department. So: Trump kicked out Russia’s diplomats, to satisfy those neocons — the neoconservatives of all Parties and persuasions, both conservative and liberal.
To satisfy the Sauds, despite the EU, Trump has dumped the Iran deal. And he did it also to satisfy Israel, the main US lobbyists for the Sauds. (Americans are far more sympathetic to Jews than to Arabs; the Sauds are aware of this; Israel handles their front-office.) For Trump, the Sauds are higher priority than Europe; even Israel (who are an expense instead of a moneybag for the US Government) are higher priority than Europe. Both the Sauds and Israel together are vastly higher. And the Sauds alone are higher priority for Trump than are even Canada and Europe combined. Under Trump, anything will be done in order to keep the Sauds and their proxy-lobbyists (Israel) ‘on America’s side’.
Consequently, Trump’s political base is mainly against Iran and for Israel, but Obama’s was mainly against Russia and for the EU. Obama’s Democratic Party still are controlled by the same billionaires as before; and, so, Democrats continue demonizing Russia, and are trying to make as impossible as they can, any rapprochement with Russia — and, therefore, they smear Trump for anything he might try to do along those lines.
Both Obama and Trump have been aiming to extend America’s aristocracy’s dominance around the world, but they employ different strategies toward that politically bipartisan American-aristocratic objective: the US Government’s global control, for the benefit of the US aristocracy, at everyone else’s expense. Obama and Trump were placed into the White House by different groups of US billionaires, and each nominee serves his/her respective sponsors, no public anywhere — not even their voters’ welfare.
An analogous example is that, whereas Fox News, Forbes, National Review, The Weekly Standard, American Spectator, Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, Breitbart News, InfoWars, Reuters, and AP, are propagandists for the Republican Party; NPR, CNN, NBC, CBS, ABC, Mother Jones, The Atlantic, The New Republic, New Yorker, New York Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, and Salon, are propagandists for the Democratic Party; but, they all draw their chief sponsors from the same small list of donors who are America’s billionaires, since these few people control the top advertisers, investors, and charities, and thus control nearly all of the nation’s propaganda. The same people who control the Government control the public; but, America isn’t a one-Party dictatorship. America is, instead, a multi-Party dictatorship. And this is how it functions.
Trump cancelled the Iran deal because a different group of billionaires are now in control of the White House, and of the rest of the US Government. Trump’s group demonize especially Iran; Obama’s group demonize especially Russia. That’s it, short. That’s America’s aristocratic tug-of-war; but both sides of it are for invasion, and for war. Thus, we’re in the condition of ‘permanent war for permanent peace’ — to satisfy the military contractors and the billionaires who control them. Any US President who would resist that, would invite assassination; but, perhaps in Trump’s case, impeachment, or other removal-from-office, would be likelier. In any case, the sponsors need to be satisfied — or else — and Trump knows this.
Trump is doing what he thinks he has to be doing, for his own safety. He’s just a figurehead for a different faction of the US aristocracy, than Obama was. He’s doing what he thinks he needs to be doing, for his survival. Political leadership is an extremely dangerous business. Trump is playing a slightly different game of it than Obama did, because he represents a different faction than Obama did. These two factions of the US aristocracy are also now battling each other for political control over Europe.
- Vacation: Americans Get A Raw Deal
Madrid is a peculiar place in August. Aside from the stifling heat, the traffic isn’t too hectic, restaurants are either closed or distinctly emptier while tourist hotspots are unusually quieter. That sense of tranquility is due to the locals leaving the the Spanish capital in order to find refuge from the scorching temperatures in the countryside and along the coast.
Additionally, as Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, Spanish workers have no problems leaving their jobs for weeks on end given that they have a statutory minimum of 22 paid vacation days, according to the OECD.
They get 14 public holidays on top of that, meaning they get a grand total of 36 paid days leave annually. Many workers get even days depending on their company and position.
You will find more infographics at Statista
The situation in France is similar with motorways clogged with traffic every August as people flee the cities to start their summer holidays. French workers also get a minimum of 36 paid days off every year, of which 11 are public holidays and 25 are the statutory minimum.
Elsewhere the vacation allowance falls in Asia’s major economies with South Korean workers getting a minimum of 15 days and people in Japan getting a mere 10.
That’s still far better than workers in the United States.
While people in France and Spain spend weeks chilling at the beach, most Americans are more than likely still stuck at their desks.
The U.S. remains the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee paid vacation. Even though some companies are generous and provide their employees with up to 15 days of paid leave annually, almost one in four private sector workers does not receive any paid vacation, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
- Saudi Arabia Starts To Weaponize Its Wealth
Authored by Lionel Laurent, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,
Here’s a subject that Elon Musk might think twice before tweeting about.
Resource-rich Saudi Arabia, which in recent months amassed a $2 billion stake in the Twitter-mad billionaire’s electric-car company Tesla Inc., has declared economic war on Canada. The cause was a tweet by Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, whose call for the release of social activists arrested by the Gulf monarchy earned a stunningly disproportionate response this week.
Loonie Tunes
The absolute impact of Saudi’s spat is small, but fear of an escalation hit the Canadian dollar
Source: Bloomberg
Intraday times are displayed in ET.
Riyadh has halted new investments in Ottawa, expelled Canada’s ambassador, stopped the state airline flying there, suspended a student exchange program, pulled medical patients from Canadian hospitals, and started selling off Canadian assets (according to the Financial Times.) It’s out to punish the Canadians “no matter the cost,” a source close to the situation told the FT.
Musk should have reason to care. He’s half-Canadian, and studied in Canada. Had he built his cash-guzzling automaker north of the International Boundary, the Saudis would doubtless take a different view on that backing for Tesla – and the possibility of helping him take the company private again.
Indeed, it’s this apparent Saudi willingness to “weaponize” its overseas investments that should give western governments and business leaders pause for thought everywhere – and might explain in part why Canada’s allies have been slow to offer backing to Freeland and her prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
We’ve seen this style of economic warfare before – in the 1970s, Arab states wielded the “oil weapon” – but this latest attack comes after a dramatic increase in Riyadh’s foreign investments.
Black Gold
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is spending abroad, but at what cost?
Source: Bloomberg
Note: Vision Fund investment is stated five-year goal
The Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia’s wealth fund, owns stakes in Uber Technologies Inc., German transport firm Hapag-Lloyd AG, Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, an infrastructure partnership with Blackstone Group and the biggest-ever technology investment vehicle with SoftBank Group Corp. Turning Saudi’s state investment arm into a $2 trillion powerhouse is core to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s strategy of diversifying the economy away from oil.
Few have seen fit to turn down this money. Yet we’ve already witnessed the collateral business damage the Saudis can inflict if another country displeases them. In September, a Riyadh-led economic blockade of Qatar forced that country’s wealth fund to sell shares in far-flung companies like Tiffany & Co. and Credit Suisse Group AG to prop up its domestic economy.
The latest geopolitical spat is small in terms of absolute economic impact. Canada-Saudi trade is tiny, and Saudi doesn’t own many assets in the country. But it shouldn’t be dismissed lightly.
Canada’s western allies want to encourage “MBS” because they believe he offers the best chance of bringing the kingdom into the rich-country mainstream. Yet there’s a risk in handing too much economic leverage to a government that’s clearly ready to use it to halt even the most anodyne criticism of its human rights situation. As Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric shows, we’re moving into an era where these bi-lateral fights are becoming the norm.
Those Saudi billions may come in handy – just ask Musk. But there are serious conditions attached.
- Crisis Levels: California's Housing Affordability Plummets To 10-Year Low
California’s housing affordability crisis is progressively getting worse. It has now plummeted to its lowest level in 10-years, and less than one in five households can afford to purchase a median-priced single-family home in the Bay Area, according to new data released by the California Association of Realtors (CAR).
CAR released its second-quarter Housing Affordability Index report (HAI), based on the percentage of all households that can afford to purchase a median-priced, single-family home in the state. CAR also reports affordability indices for regions and counties within the state. The index is regarded as the most fundamental benchmark of housing well-being for home buyers.
The percentage of homebuyers who could afford to buy a median-priced, existing single-family home in the state declined from 31 percent in the first quarter to 26 in the second quarter; in the previous year, the index was at 29 percent, according to CAR’s HAI.
The second quarter marked the 21st consecutive quarter that CAR’s HAI printed below 40 percent; the index topped at 56 percent in the first quarter of 2012.
The report showed that prospective homebuyers would need to have minimum annual income of $126,500 to prequalify for the purchase of a $596,730 statewide median-priced, existing single-family home in the second quarter. Assuming a 20 percent down payment and an effective composite interest rate of 4.70 percent, the monthly payments of a 30-year fixed-rate loan would be around $3,160.
The California counties that recorded 10-year lows in housing affordability were Alameda, Merced, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma.
Here are the areas where housing affordability is at crisis levels: Santa Cruz (12 percent), San Francisco, San Mateo, and Mono (all at 14 percent), and Alameda and Santa Clara (both at 16 percent).
According to CAR’s index, the most affordable counties in California during the second quarter were Lassen (64 percent), Kern (53 percent), Madera (52 percent), Tehama (51 percent) and Kings (50 percent).
Housing Affordability Peaked At 1Q 2012
Housing Affordability — Traditional Index
Affordability Peak vs. Current
Minimum Annual Income Required During Affordability Peak vs. Current
Monthly PITI During Affordability Peak vs. Current
In a separate, but relevant report from CAR, data shows California’s real estate market could have already peaked.
California Home Sales Declined for the 1 st Time in 4 Months
Sales Lost Momentum as Mortgage RatesContinued to Climb
California is one of the largest housing markets in the nation, as it has been a forward leading indicator for the rest of the country. Amid a housing shortage, which has blossomed into a housing affordability crisis, sales this summer have started to tumble, even as more inventory comes online. The supply of homes for sale increased annually in June for the first time in three years, according to the National Association of Realtors, which has depressed sales for the third straight month.
And now it seems, California’s real estate market could be in the beginning stages of a correction to fair value, after nearly a decade of speculation forced much of the median-priced single-family homes out of reach of the middle class – contributing to the housing affordability index at a 10-year low.
- South African Rand Flash-Crashes 10% As Turkey Contagion Spreads
Amid increased anxiety over Ramaphosa’s white farmer land confiscation and reports of a $4.2 billion bailout of state-owned enterprises, the Emerging Market rout in Turkey has sparked a collapse in the Rand in early Asia trading.
The Rand crashed 10% against the dollar almost instantaneously as Asian FX markets opened…
Looks like Ramaphosa top-ticked it…
As Simon Black warned back in March, when Ramaphosa to push for the constitutional change required to confiscate white farmers’ lands, this would guarantee a banking crisis for the country. Here’s why – a lot of this land that the government wants to confiscate probably has quite a bit of bank debt.
Imagine – you just bought a farm for, say, 50 million rand (that’s about USD $3 million). And in order to do so, you took out a hefty loan from a South African bank.
Now the government comes along and steals your property.
Are you seriously going to keep paying the loan?
Of course not.
This means that the banks are going to be stuck with massive defaults and bad debts, leading to a wave of bank failures.
So in their crusade to bring Social Justice to South Africa, the government is effectively engineering a banking crisis in their country.
This is criminally stupid behavior that puts South Africa on the same path that Zimbabwe followed in the late 1990s.
And now, as Bloomberg reports, South Africa is planning a 59 billion-rand ($4.2 billion) bailout for state-owned companies including the post office, arms manufacturer Denel SOC Ltd. and South African Airways, the Johannesburg-based Sunday Times reported, citing unidentified government officials.
The contagion from Turkey’s collapse is not helping as broad-based EM liquidations are dragging everything lower…
As the Emerging Market FX rout continues…
And offshore Yuan is sliding…
We look forward to the Brazilian Real opening…
🌊 🏄 Dude! > #Brazil‘s Rodrigo Koxa sets record for biggest wave ever surfed #SundayMorning #surfer pic.twitter.com/5FA5rt31S7
— Evan Kirstel (@evankirstel) August 12, 2018
- Chicago's Obamaland "Scam" Reaches Mainstream Media
Authored by WirePoints’ Mark Glennon, op-ed via The Wall Street Journal,
The Obama Center Can Afford More Than $1 Rent
It’s a political ‘institute,’ not a presidential library. So taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for anything…
When Barack Obama announced he would forgo a presidential library, the news was trumpeted as a win for good government. Instead, Mr. Obama would open an official center on Chicago’s South Side, funded entirely with private money. One author at Politico, who called presidential libraries a “scam,” wrote that Mr. Obama “will rip off the band-aid, removing government from what it has no business paying for.”
Now comes news that Illinois taxpayers will put up at least $174 million for roadway and transit reconfigurations needed to accommodate the Obama Center. If you don’t live in Illinois, you may be smirking – but you’ll be footing the bill, too. Eighty percent of such spending is generally reimbursed by the federal government, and Illinois officials confirmed to me that they expect to receive $139 million from Washington if they request it.
All that taxpayer money – and for what? Originally, Chicagoans imagined they’d be getting a true presidential library, akin to those they might have visited for Ronald Reagan in California or John F. Kennedy in Boston. But unlike those libraries, the Obama Center won’t be run by the National Archives and Records Administration. It won’t even house Mr. Obama’s records, artifacts and papers, which will be digitized and available online. Instead the center will be owned and operated by the Obama Foundation.
This wasn’t always the plan. In a 2014 request for proposal, the Obama Foundation said that the planned presidential library “will include an Institute that will enhance the pursuit of the President’s initiatives beyond 2017.” This institute now seems to have taken over the project. As the Chicago Tribune reported in February: “Obama said he envisions his center as a place where young people from around the world can meet each other, get training and prepare to become the next generation of leaders.” No doubt, his definition of “leaders” will be political.
Which raises the question of why the state and city are giving the Obama Center official support. Back when it was still being sold as an official presidential library, the city of Chicago took steps to allow the project to be built in Jackson Park. Under a deal approved by the City Council in May, the Obama Foundation will lease 19.3 acres in perpetuity for $1. A nonprofit group called Protect our Parks has filed a federal lawsuit alleging that this violates state law. The suit calls the Obama Center a “bait and switch,” since the “public purpose” of a presidential library no longer exists.
Then there’s the road and transit money. Last fall WTTW, a Chicago public television station, was reporting skeptically on “preliminary plans” for Illinois to cough up $100 million to “assist” the Obama Center: “How could a public financing proposal fly in a state that is bleeding red ink, especially when the Obamas have promised 100 percent private funding?”
In response, a spokeswoman for the Obama Foundation insisted to WTTW that “construction and maintenance will be funded by private donations, and no taxpayer money will go to the foundation.” That may be true in the narrow sense, but the state’s appropriation for roadway and transit fixes is serious cash. Imagine the cries of corporate welfare if Chicago lured a big company to town with direct infrastructure spending of $174 million.
So why no fuss about ponying up to help the Obama Center? There are two answers:
The first is that Illinois’s machine politicians dropped the appropriation this summer into a 1,246-page budget bill, which was then presented to rank-and-file legislators only hours before the vote.
The second is that after a few Republicans objected to spending state money for the Obama Center, they were told not to fret: Federal reimbursements were on the way. “We were assured by Republican leadership not to worry,” state Rep. Jeanne Ives told me, “since 80% of the cost would be picked up by the federal government.”
If he tried, President Obama could probably raise more than enough private money to forgo sweetheart deals. Does anybody really think the Obama Foundation can’t afford more than $1 rent? Yet Chicago’s loyal Democrats are only too happy to give him the land free, then pour tax money into the road reconfigurations the project requires. “The state’s $174 million investment in infrastructure improvements near the Obama Center,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, “is money well spent.” Mr. Emanuel was President Obama’s first chief of staff.
So if you wind up visiting Chicago some years from now, and you spot a tall stone tower teeming with future leaders of the Democratic Party, give yourself a pat on the back. No matter where in America you’re from, your tax money will have helped to make the Obama Center possible.
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