- Hypocrisy Without Bounds: US Army Major Slams The Tragedy Of "Liberal" Foreign Policy
Authored by Maj. Danny Sjrusen via AntiWar.com,
The president says he will bring the troops home from Syria and Afghanistan. Now, because of their pathological hatred of Trump, mainstream Democrats are hysterical in their opposition.
If anyone else were president, the “liberals” would be celebrating. After all, pulling American soldiers out of a couple of failing, endless wars seems like a “win” for progressives. Heck, if Obama did it there might be a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. And there should be. The intervention in Syria is increasingly aimless, dangerous and lacks an end state. Afghanistan is an unwinnable war – America’s longest – and about to end in outright militarydefeat. Getting out now and salvaging so much national blood and treasure ought to be a progressive dream. There’s only one problem: Donald Trump. Specifically, that it was Trump who gave the order to begin the troop withdrawals.
Lost in the haze of their pathological hatred of President Trump, the majority of mainstream liberal pundits and politicians can’t, for the life of them, see the good sense in extracting the troops from a couple Mideast quagmires. That or they can see the positives, but, in their obsessive compulsion to smear the president, choose politics over country. It’s probably a bit of both. That’s how tribally partisan American political discourse has become. And, how reflexively hawkish and interventionist today’s mainstream Democrats now are. Whither the left-wing antiwar movement? Well, except for a few diehards out there, the movement seems to have been buried long ago with George McGovern.
Make no mistake, the Democrats have been tacking to the right on foreign policy and burgeoning their tough-guy-interventionist credentials for decades now. Terrified of being painted as soft or dovish on martial matters, just about all the “serious” baby-boomer Dems proudly co-opted the militarist line and gladly accepted campaign cash from the corporate arms dealers. Think about it, any Democrat with serious future presidential aspirations back in 2002 voted for the Iraq War – Hillary, Joe Biden, even former peace activist John Kerry! And, in spite of the party base now moving to the left, all these big name hawks – along with current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer – are still Democratic stalwarts. Heck, some polls list Biden as the party’s 2020 presidential frontrunner.
More disturbing than the inconsistency of these political hacks is the vacuousness of the supposedly liberal media. After Trump’s announcement of troop withdrawals, just about every MSNBC host slammed the president and suddenly sounded more hawkish than the clowns over at Fox News. Take Rachel Maddow. Whatever you think of her politics, she is – undoubtedly – a brilliant woman. Furthermore, unlike most pundits, she knows a little something about foreign policy. Her 2012 book, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power was a serious and well-researched critique of executive power and the ongoing failure of the wars on terror. Drift was well reviewed by regular readers and scholars alike.
Enter Donald Trump. Ever since the man won the 2016 election, Maddow’s nightly show has been dominated the hopeless dream of Russia-collusion and a desire for Trump’s subsequent impeachment. Admittedly, Maddow’s anti-Trump rhetoric isn’t completely unfounded – this author, after all, has spent the better part of two years criticizing most of his policies – but her zealousness has clouded her judgment, or worse. Indeed, that Maddow, and her fellow “liberals” at MSNBC have now criticized the troop withdrawals and even paraded a slew of disgraced neoconservatives – like Bill Kristol – on their shows seems final proof of their descent into opportunistic hawkishness.
One of the most disturbing aspects of this new “liberal” hawkishness is the pundits’ regular canonization of Jim Mattis and the other supposed “adults” in the room. For mainstream, Trump-loathing, liberals the only saving grace for this administration was its inclusion of a few trusted, “grown-up” generals in the cabinet. Yet it is a dangerous day, indeed, when the supposedly progressive journalists deify only the military men in the room. Besides, Mattis was no friend to the liberals. Their beloved President Obama previously canned “mad-dog” for his excessive bellicosity towards Iran. Furthermore, Mattis – so praised for both his judgment and ethics – chose an interesting issue for which to finally fall-on-his-sword and resign. U.S. support for the Saudi-led starvation of 85,000 kids in Yemen: Mattis could deal with that. But a modest disengagement from even one endless war in the Middle East: well, the former SECDEF just couldn’t countenance that. Thus, he seems a strange figure for a “progressive” network to deify.
Personally, I’d like to debate a few of the new “Cold Warriors” over at MSNBC or CNN and ask a simple series of questions: what on the ground changed in Syria or Afghanistan that has suddenly convinced you the US must stay put? And, what positivist steps should the military take in those locales, in order to achieve what purpose exactly? Oh, by the way, I’d ask my debate opponents to attempt their answers without uttering the word Trump. The safe money says they couldn’t do it – not by a long shot. Because, you see, these pundits live and die by their hatred of all things Trump and the more times they utter his name the higher go the ratings and the faster the cash piles up. It’s a business model not any sort of display of honest journalism.
There’s a tragic irony here. By the looks of things, so long as Mr. Trump is president, it seems that any real movement for less interventionism in the Greater Middle East may come from a part of the political right – libertarians like Rand Paul along with the president’s die hard base, which is willing to follow him on any policy pronouncement. Paradoxically, these folks may find some common cause with the far left likes of Bernie Sanders and the Ocasio-Cortez crowd, but it seems unlikely that the mainstream left is prepared to lead a new antiwar charge. What with Schumer/Pelosi still in charge, you can forget about it. Given the once powerful left-led Vietnam-era protest movement, today’s Dems seem deficient indeed on foreign policy substance. Odds are they’ll cede this territory, once again, to the GOP.
By taking a stronger interventionist, even militarist, stand than Trump on Syria and Afghanistan, the Democrats are wading into dangerous waters. Maybe, as some say, this president shoots from the hip and has no core policy process or beliefs. Perhaps. Then again, Trump did crush fifteen Republican mainstays in 2015 and shock Hillary – and the world – in 2016. Indeed, he may know just what he’s doing. While the Beltway, congressional-military-industrial complex continues to support ever more fighting and dying around the world, for the most part the American people do not. Trump, in fact, ran on a generally anti-interventionist platform, calling the Iraq War “dumb” and not to be repeated. The president’s sometimes earthy – if coarse – commonsense resonated with a lot of voters, and Hillary’s hawkish establishment record (including her vote for that very same Iraq War) didn’t win her many new supporters.
Liberals have long believed, at least since McGovern’s 1972 trouncing by Richard Nixon, that they could out-hawk the Republican hawks and win over some conservatives. It rarely worked. In fact, Dems have been playing right into bellicose Republican hands for decades. And, if they run a baby-boomer-era hawk in 2020 – say Joe Biden – they’ll be headed for another shocking defeat. The combination of a (mostly, so far) strong economy and practical policy of returning US troops from unpopular wars, could, once again, out weigh this president’s other liabilities.
Foreign policy won’t, by itself, tip a national election. But make no mistake, if the clowns at MSNBC and “liberal” hacks on Capitol Hill keep touting their newfound militarism, they’re likely to emerge from 2020 with not only smeared consciences, but four more years in the opposition.
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Danny Sjursen is a US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.com He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.
[Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
- Visualizing The World's Largest 10 Economies In 2030
Today’s emerging markets are tomorrow’s powerhouses, according to a recent forecast from Standard Chartered, a multinational bank headquartered in London.
The bank sees developing economies like Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, and Egypt all moving up the ladder – and by 2030, it estimates that seven of the world’s largest 10 economies by GDP (PPP) will be located in emerging markets.
Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
COMPARING 2017 VS. 2030
To create some additional context, Visual Capitalists’s Jeff Desjardins has compared these projections to the IMF’s most recent data on GDP (PPP) for 2017. We’ve also added in potential % change for each country, if comparing these two data sets directly.
Here’s how the numbers change:
Possibly the biggest surprise on the list is Egypt, a country that Standard Chartered sees growing at a torrid pace over this timeframe.
If comparing using the 2017 IMF figures, the difference between the two numbers is an astonishing 583%. This makes such a projection quite ambitious, especially considering that organizations such as the IMF see Egypt averaging closer to 8% in annual GDP growth (PPP) over the next few years.
THE ASCENT OF EMERGING MARKETS
Egypt aside, it’s likely that the ascent of emerging markets will continue to be a theme in future projections by other banks and international organizations.
By 2030, India will be the second largest economy in PPP terms according to many different models – and by then, it will also be the most populous country in the world as well. (It’s expected to pass China in 2026)
With the divide between emerging and developed economies closing at a seemingly faster rate than ever before, this should be seen as an interesting opportunity for all investors taking a long-term view.
- Is Paul Whelan A Spy?
Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The media has a new bit of speculation that fits neatly into the flagging Russiagate narrative. It concerns Paul Whelan, a high school graduate Marine Corps dishonorable discharge, who is currently working in corporate security for a Michigan-based auto parts manufacturer. Whelan, who lives alone, is self-taught in Russian and has engaged in tourist travel to the country a number of times. He was reportedly arrested late last month in Moscow while ostensibly attending a friend’s wedding and charged with espionage. Forty-eight year-old Whelan is clearly an odd duck and is notable for having four passports – Great Britain, Ireland, Canada and that of the United States.
Press coverage of the incident has nearly unanimously decided that the spying charge against Whelan is phony and that he is being held as bait to arrange for an exchange with Maria Butina, who is in jail in Virginia after being charged with acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government and engaging in conspiracy. The media and the usual pundits base their conclusion on absolutely no evidence whatsoever apart from their conviction that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a bad man who would do almost anything to irritate the United States and overthrow its system of government. Oddly, the press watchdogs fail to note how the current federal government is doing a damned fine job destroying itself without any assistance from the Kremlin. If Putin really wanted to damage the US, he would be best advised to leave it alone and let Congress and the White House do the heavy lifting for him.
Unlike the mainstream media, I rather expect that the charges against Whelan could be more-or-less correct, though not in the way the press has framed the story, which is that Whelan is such a flawed character that he could not possibly meet the requirements to be working for any sophisticated spy organization. The New York Times in its coverage of the story interviewed several former CIA officers who had served in Russia, but asked the wrong questions. The reporter wanted to know if Whelan could possibly be an employee of US intelligence. The ex-Agency officers replied “no” because of his criminal record while a Marine and other oddities in his career, which included some marginal involvement with low-level law enforcement.
The former spooks were correct to state that Whelan would not pass the security hurdles for employment as a staff officer, but there is also a whole other level of possible engagement with the Agency, DIA or JSOC – cooperating as one of the sources which intelligence organizations recruit and run to collect information.
The flawed but nevertheless useful Whelan would be a perfect target for recruitment as an intelligence source, referred to in the business as “agents.”
Unusually for a foreigner, Whelan has a social media account on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, which is quite likely how he came to the attention of CIA or the Pentagon. And The New York Times, interestingly, describes his friends on the site as “men with some sort of connection to academies run by the Russian Navy, the Defense Ministry or the Civil Aviation Authority.” That alone would be enough to generate considerable interest in American intelligence circles as sources with that kind of access are hard to find.
And the details of Whelan’s arrest, if true, are completely consistent with how a low- to mid-level source might be run and used by a US government case officer. According to Russian accounts published in Rosbalt, a news agency close to the Kremlin, an unidentified intelligence source revealed that Whelan was trying to recruit a Russian citizen to obtain classified information regarding employees at various government agencies when he was caught in flagrante. He was arrested five minutes later in what was clearly a sting operation after having received a USB stick that included a list of all of the employees that he apparently had requested.
It may turn out that Paul Whelan is completely innocent and is merely a pawn in a tit-for-tat chess game being played by Washington and Moscow. If so, it is to be hoped that he will be proven innocent and released, but no one should rule out his having been recruited and exploited by a US government agency. Spying is not a game. It is a dangerous business, with serious consequences for those who are caught.
- Model Reveals Diet Secrets Of The Insta-Fabulous: "Tapas And Cocaine"
Before getting pregnant with her first child, Instagram model-influencer Ruby Tuesday Matthews said she relied on a steady diet of “tapas, cigarettes, black coffee and cocaine” to maintain her svelte 120 lbs. figure, the Daily Mail reported.
Matthews, who hails from the Australian city of Byron Bay, where she runs a successful Instagram account that frequently features images of her two young sons, dished on the unhealthy lifestyle she lived to maintain her glamorous image.
While this might not sound like something that a functional human being could maintain for long, Matthews revealed in the interview that she isn’t alone: Most models and Instagram influencers take drugs to maintain their unrealistic weights.
“I need to be careful what I’m saying here, but in the influencer industry, everyone loves the baggie,” she said during a Q&A with her 200,000 Instagram followers. “This is how most physiques are maintained.”
The 25-year-old model said many of her followers were baffled by her ability to “eat and stay so thin.” But her secret was the fact that she hid her addiction well.
“People don’t realise how easy it is to hide something. Whether it’s addiction, depression, anxiety, it’s easy to hide those things.”
Matthews said she gave up cocaine after learning that she was pregnant. After partying hard the night before, she said she became concerned that her actions would hurt the baby.
“I was so thin and I was partying a lot and no one thought I would be able to fall pregnant,” she said.
The conversation took a dark turn when Matthews recounted how she became suicidal after having a miscarriage when she was 16. Her mother and the baby’s father were relieved when it happened, but she said she couldn’t get over the loss and was eventually sent to Cambodia by her parents to recover, where she “worked for a few years.”
The model said she hoped that talking about her demons would help others struggling with similar issues.
“I have battled with mental health demons on and off for most of my life. It is a topic I am going to be talking about a lot more this year,” she said.
Fortunately, she’s in a better place now and is focused on raising her two young children.
- 2019: World Economy Is Reaching Growth Limits; Expect Low Oil Prices, Financial Turbulence
Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,
Financial markets have been behaving in a very turbulent manner in the last couple of months. The issue, as I see it, is that the world economy is gradually shifting from a growth mode to a mode of shrinkage. This is something like a ship changing course, from going in one direction to going in reverse. The system acts as if the brakes are being very forcefully applied, and reaction of the economy is to almost shake.
What seems to be happening is that the world economy is reaching Limits to Growth, as predicted in the computer simulations modeled in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth. In fact, the base model of that set of simulations indicated that peak industrial output per capita might be reached right about now. Peak food per capita might be reached about the same time. I have added a dotted line to the forecast from this model, indicating where the economy seems to be in 2019, relative to the base model.
Figure 1. Base scenario from The Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil with dotted line at 2019 added by author. The 2019 line is drawn based on where the world economy seems to be now, rather than on precisely where the base model would put the year 2019.
The economy is a self-organizing structure that operates under the laws of physics. Many people have thought that when the world economy reaches limits, the limits would be of the form of high prices and “running out” of oil. This represents an overly simple understanding of how the system works. What we should really expect, and in fact, what we are now beginning to see, is production cuts in finished goods made by the industrial system, such as cell phones and automobiles, because of affordability issues. Indirectly, these affordability issues lead to low commodity prices and low profitability for commodity producers. For example:
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The sale of Chinese private passenger vehicles for the year of 2018 through November is down by 2.8%, with November sales off by 16.1%. Most analysts are forecasting this trend of contracting sales to continue into 2019. Lower sales seem to reflect affordability issues.
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Saudi Arabia plans to cut oil production by 800,000 barrels per day from the November 2018 level, to try to raise oil prices. Profits are too low at current prices.
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Coal is reported not to have an economic future in Australia, partly because of competition from subsidized renewables and partly because China and India want to prop up the prices of coal from their own coal mines.
The Significance of Trump’s Tariffs
If a person looks at history, it becomes clear that tariffs are a standard response to a problem of shrinking food or industrial output per capita. Tariffs were put in place in the 1920s in the time leading up to the Great Depression, and were investigated after the Panic of 1857, which seems to have indirectly led to the US Civil War.
Whenever an economy produces less industrial or food output per capita there is an allocation problem: who gets cut off from buying output similar to the amount that they previously purchased? Tariffs are a standard way that a relatively strong economy tries to gain an advantage over weaker economies. Tariffs are intended to help the citizens of the strong economy maintain their previous quantity of goods and services, even as other economies are forced to get along with less.
I see Trump’s trade policies primarily as evidence of an underlying problem, namely, the falling affordability of goods and services for a major segment of the population. Thus, Trump’s tariffs are one of the pieces of evidence that lead me to believe that the world economy is reaching Limits to Growth.
The Nature of World Economic Growth
Economic growth seems to require growth in three dimensions (a) Complexity, (b) Debt Bubble, and (c) Use of Resources. Today, the world economy seems to be reaching limits in all three of these dimensions (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Complexity involves adding more technology, more international trade and more specialization. Its downside is that it indirectly tends to reduce affordability of finished end products because of growing wage disparity; many non-elite workers have wages that are too low to afford very much of the output of the economy. As more complexity is added, wage disparity tends to increase. International wage competition makes the situation worse.
A growing debt bubble can help keep commodity prices up because a rising amount of debt can indirectly provide more demand for goods and services. For example, if there is growing debt, it can be used to buy homes, cars, and vacation travel, all of which require oil and other energy consumption.
If debt levels become too high, or if regulators decide to raise short-term interest rates as a method of slowing the economy, the debt bubble is in danger of collapsing. A collapsing debt bubble tends to lead to recession and falling commodity prices. Commodity prices fell dramatically in the second half of 2008. Prices now seem to be headed downward again, starting in October 2018.
Figure 3. Brent oil prices with what appear to be debt bubble collapses marked.
Figure 4. Three-month treasury secondary market rates compared to 10-year treasuries from FRED, with points where short term interest rates exceed long term rates marked by author with arrows.
Even the relatively slow recent rise in short-term interest rates (Figure 4) seems to be producing a decrease in oil prices (Figure 3) in a way that a person might expect from a debt bubble collapse. The sale of US Quantitative Easing assets at the same time that interest rates have been rising no doubt adds to the problem of falling oil prices and volatile stock markets. The gray bars in Figure 4 indicate recessions.
Growing use of resources becomes increasingly problematic for two reasons. One is population growth. As population rises, the economy needs more food to feed the growing population. This leads to the need for more complexity (irrigation, better seed, fertilizer, world trade) to feed the growing world population.
The other problem with growing use of resources is diminishing returns, leading to the rising cost of extracting commodities over time. Diminishing returns occur because producers tend to extract the cheapest to extract commodities first, leaving in place the commodities requiring deeper wells or more processing. Even water has this difficulty. At times, desalination, at very high cost, is needed to obtain sufficient fresh water for a growing population.
Why Inadequate Energy Supplies Lead to Low Oil Prices Rather than High
In the last section, I discussed the cost of producing commodities of many kinds rising because of diminishing returns. Higher costs should lead to higher prices, shouldn’t they?
Strangely enough, higher costs translate to higher prices only sometimes. When energy consumption per capita is rising rapidly (peaks of red areas on Figure 5), rising costs do seem to translate to rising prices. Spiking oil prices were experienced several times: 1917 to 1920; 1974 to 1982; 2004 to mid 2008; and 2011 to 2014. All of these high oil prices occurred toward the end of the red peaks on Figure 5. In fact, these high oil prices (as well as other high commodity prices that tend to rise at the same time as oil prices) are likely what brought growth in energy consumption down. The prices of goods and services made with these commodities became unaffordable for lower-wage workers, indirectly decreasing the growth rate in energy products consumed.
Figure 5.
The red peaks represented periods of very rapid growth, fed by growing supplies of very cheap energy: coal and hydroelectricity in the Electrification and Early Mechanizationperiod, oil in the Postwar Boom, and coal in the China period. With low energy prices, many countries were able to expand their economies simultaneously, keeping demand high. The Postwar Boom also reflected the addition of many women to the labor force, increasing the ability of families to afford second cars and nicer homes.
Rapidly growing energy consumption allowed per capita output of both food (with meat protein given a higher count than carbohydrates) and industrial products to grow rapidly during these peaks. The reason that output of these products could grow is because the laws of physics require energy consumption for heat, transportation, refrigeration and other processes required by industrialization and farming. In these boom periods, higher energy costs were easy to pass on. Eventually the higher energy costs “caught up with” the economy, and pushed growth in energy consumption per capita down, putting an end to the peaks.
Figure 6 shows Figure 5 with the valleys labeled, instead of the peaks.
Figure 6.
When I say that the world economy is reaching “peak industrial output per capita” and “peak food per capita,” this represents the opposite of a rapidly growing economy. In fact, if the world is reaching Limits to Growth, the situation is even worse than all of the labeled valleys on Figure 6. In such a case, energy consumption growth is likely to shrink so low that even the blue area (population growth) turns negative.
In such a situation, the big problem is “not enough to go around.” While cost increases due to diminishing returns could easily be passed along when growth in industrial and food output per capita were rapidly rising (the Figure 5 situation), this ability seems to disappear when the economy is near limits. Part of the problem is that the lower growth in per capita energy affects the kinds of job that are available. With low energy consumption growth, many of the jobs that are available are service jobs that do not pay well. Wage disparity becomes an increasing problem.
When wage disparity grows, the share of low wage workers rises. If businesses try to pass along their higher costs of production, they encounter market resistance because lower wage workers cannot afford the finished goods made with high cost energy products. For example, auto and iPhone sales in China decline. The lack of Chinese demand tends to lead to a drop in demand for the many commodities used in manufacturing these goods, including both energy products and metals. Because there is very little storage capacity for commodities, a small decline in demand tends to lead to quite a large decline in prices. Even a small decline in China’s demand for energy products can lead to a big decline in oil prices.
Strange as it may seem, the economy ends up with low oil prices, rather than high oil prices, being the problem. Other commodity prices tend to be low as well.
What Is Ahead, If We Are Reaching Economic Growth Limits?
1. Figure 1 at the top of this post seems to give an indication of what is ahead after 2019, but this forecast cannot be relied on. A major issue is that the limited model used at that time did not include the financial system or debt. Even if the model seems to provide a reasonably accurate estimate of when limits will hit, it won’t necessarily give a correct view of what the impact of limits will be on the rest of the economy, after limits hit. The authors, in fact, have said that the model should not be expected to provide reliable indications regarding how the economy will behave after limits have started to have an impact on economic output.
2. As indicated in the title of this post, considerable financial volatility can be expected in 2019 if the economy is trying to slow itself. Stock prices will be erratic; interest rates will be erratic; currency relativities will tend to bounce around. The likelihood that derivatives will cause major problems for banks will rise because derivatives tend to assume more stability in values than now seems to be the case. Increasing problems with derivatives raises the risk of bank failure.
3. The world economy doesn’t necessarily fail all at once. Instead, pieces that are, in some sense, “less efficient” users of energy may shrink back. During the Great Recession of 2008-2009, the countries that seemed to be most affected were countries such as Greece, Spain, and Italy that depend on oil for a disproportionately large share of their total energy consumption. China and India, with energy mixes dominated by coal, were much less affected.
Figure 7. Oil consumption as a percentage of total energy consumption, based on 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data.
Figure 8. Energy consumption per capita for selected areas, based on energy consumption data from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy and United Nations 2017 Population Estimates by Country.
In the 2002-2008 period, oil prices were rising faster than prices of other fossil fuels. This tended to make countries using a high share of oil in their energy mix less competitive in the world market. The low labor costs of China and India gave these countries another advantage. By the end of 2007, China’s energy consumption per capita had risen to a point where it almost matched the (now lower) energy consumption of the European countries shown. China, with its low energy costs, seems to have “eaten the lunch” of some of its European competitors.
In 2019 and the years that follow, some countries may fare at least somewhat better than others. The United States, for now, seems to be faring better than many other parts of the world.
4. While we have been depending upon China to be a leader in economic growth, China’s growth is already faltering and may turn to contraction in the near future. One reason is an energy problem: China’s coal production has fallen because many of its coal mines have been closed due to lack of profitability. As a result, China’s need for imported energy (difference between black line and top of energy production stack) has been growing rapidly. China is now the largest importer of oil, coal, and natural gas in the world. It is very vulnerable to tariffs and to lack of available supplies for import.
Figure 9. China energy production by fuel plus its total energy consumption, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
A second issue is that demographics are working against China; its working-age population already seems to be shrinking. A third reason why China is vulnerable to economic difficulties is because of its growing debt level. Debt becomes difficult to repay with interest if the economy slows.
5. Oil exporters such as Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria have become vulnerable to government overthrow or collapse because of low world oil prices since 2014. If the central government of one or more of these exporters disappears, it is possible that the pieces of the country will struggle along, producing a lower amount of oil, as Libya has done in recent years. It is also possible that another larger country will attempt to take over the failing production of the country and secure the output for itself.
6. Epidemics become increasingly likely, especially in countries with serious financial problems, such as Yemen, Syria, and Venezuela. Historically, much of the decrease in population in countries with collapsing economies has come from epidemics. Of course, epidemics can spread across national boundaries, exporting the problems elsewhere.
7. Resource wars become increasingly likely. These can be local wars, perhaps over the availability of water. They can also be large, international wars. The timing of World War I and World War II make it seem likely that these wars were both resource wars.
Figure 10.
8. Collapsing intergovernmental agencies, such as the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, seem likely. The United Kingdom’s planned exit from the European Union in 2019 is a step toward dissolving the European Union.
9. Privately funded pension funds will increasingly be subject to default because of continued low interest rates. Some governments may choose to cut back the amounts they provide to pensioners because governments cannot collect adequate tax revenue for this purpose. Some countries may purposely shut down parts of their governments, in an attempt to hold down government spending.
10. A far worse and more permanent recession than that of the Great Recession seems likely because of the difficulty in repaying debt with interest in a shrinking economy. It is not clear when such a recession will start. It could start later in 2019, or perhaps it may wait until 2020. As with the Great Recession, some countries will be affected more than others. Eventually, because of the interconnected nature of financial systems, all countries are likely to be drawn in.
Summary
It is not entirely clear exactly what is ahead if we are reaching Limits to Growth. Perhaps that is for the best. If we cannot do anything about it, worrying about the many details of what is ahead is not the best for anyone’s mental health. While it is possible that this is an end point for the human race, this is not certain, by any means. There have been many amazing coincidences over the past 4 billion years that have allowed life to continue to evolve on this planet. More of these coincidences may be ahead. We also know that humans lived through past ice ages. They likely can live through other kinds of adversity, including worldwide economic collapse.
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- PG&E Reportedly Planning Bankruptcy Announcement To Workers As Soon As Monday
18 years after becoming one of America’s largest bankruptcies, the writing is on the wall for California’s utility giant after its cash-collateral-call triggering second downgrade to junk has led to reports that PG&E may notify employees as soon as Monday that it’s preparing a potential bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the situation.
California passed legislation last year in the aftermath of the deadly Wine Country fires requiring utilities to post public notices for employees at least 15 days before a change of control, including a bankruptcy filing.
This potential bankruptcy announcement comes after PG&E’s AIG moment hit late on Thursday, when Moody’s did precisely what S&P did two days earlier, and cut the utility’s credit rating to junk citing the electric company’s potential wildfire liabilities.
“We see a much more challenging environment for PG&E,” Moody’s analyst Jeff Cassella said in a statement. “The company is increasingly reliant on extraordinary intervention by legislators and regulators, which may not occur soon enough or be of sufficient magnitude to address these adverse developments.”
As Bloomberg reports, a notice may signal that the company has accelerated plans to make a Chapter 11 filing as way of dealing with crippling liabilities from wildfires that tore through California in 2017 and 2018, killing over 100 people and destroying hundreds of thousands of acres.
And, as we detailed previously, with two junk ratings, PG&E will now be required to use cash as collateral to guarantee power contracts, according to the company’s latest quarterly filing, which estimates the utility will have to fully collateralize as much as $800 million of positions.
That… is a problem because PG&E had only $430 million of cash on its books in September, precipitating what now appears to be an imminent liquidity crisis, one which as a result of some $30 billion in wildfire legal liabilities will quickly escalate into a solvency inferno, to use a term closely associated with California utility companies.
PG&E declined to provide a statement, saying the company doesn’t comment on rumor or speculation.
During its 2001, bankruptcy, California governor Gray Davis used the state’s treasury to bail out the utility, provoking a controversy that eventually contributed to his ouster. PG&E emerged from bankruptcy in April 2004 after returning $10.2 billion to creditors.
Newly appointed California Governor Gavin Newsom said during a press conference Thursday that his office would be making an announcement related to PG&E within the next few days and that the issue was at the top of his agenda. He said in a later interview that the announcement would involve appointments to the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s grid operator and to a commission established by legislature to explore wildfire issues.
Newsom’s office didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Citigroup Inc. called it a “a crisis of confidence.” Guggenheim Securities analysts likened the dilemma PG&E poses to investors and lawmakers as “a falling knife.”
As we pointed out previously, with relation to the last financial crisis, while Lehman was the spark, its was the bailout of AIG that really precipitated the most violent part of the 2008 crisis. While most analysts see PG&E as an isolated case, now that the biggest California utility is on the verge of bankruptcy, and is about to have its own AIG moment, one wonders just how “contained” this particular shock to the system will be.
One thing is clear, however: the shock to California residents, or rather their wallets, will be most unpleasant, as their rates are about to surge one way or another.
Think it couldn’t happen? Think again, as Bloomberg reports, PG&E’s deepening financial crisis has already spread to the companies that supply its natural gas and generate electricity for its customers. At least two small gas suppliers have restricted sales to PG&E out of concern that the company won’t be able to pay, people with direct knowledge of the situation said earlier this week.
Some banks are taking a long look at a potential $2 billion debt financing for the Geysers, the world’s largest geothermal complex, because it supplies the utility, people familiar with the matter also said this week.
- The War On Populism
Authored by CJ Hopkins via The Unz Review,
Remember when the War on Terror ended and the War on Populism began? That’s OK, no one else does.
It happened in the Summer of 2016, also known as “the Summer of Fear.” The War on Terror was going splendidly. There had been a series of “terrorist attacks,” in Orlando, Nice, Würzberg, Munich, Reutlingen, Ansbach, and Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray, each of them perpetrated by suddenly “self-radicalized” “lone wolf terrorists” (or “non-terrorist terrorists“) who had absolutely no connection to any type of organized terrorist groups prior to suddenly “self- radicalizing” themselves by consuming “terrorist content” on the Internet. It seemed we were entering a new and even more terrifying phase of the Global War on Terror, a phase in which anyone could be a “terrorist” and “terrorism” could mean almost anything.
This broadening of the already virtually meaningless definition of “terrorism” was transpiring just in time for Obama to hand off the reins to Hillary Clinton, who everyone knew was going to be the next president, and who was going to have to bomb the crap out of Syria in response to the non-terrorist terrorist threat. The War on Terror (or, rather, “the series of persistent targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America,” as Obama rebranded it) was going to continue, probably forever. The Brexit referendum had just taken place, but no one had really digested that yet … and then Trump won the nomination.
Like that scene in Orwell’s 1984 where the Party switches official enemies right in the middle of the Hate Week rally, the War on Terror was officially canceled and replaced by the War on Populism. Or … all right, it wasn’t quite that abrupt. But seriously, go back and scan the news. Note how the “Islamic terrorist threat” we had been conditioned to live in fear of on a daily basis since 2001 seemed to just vanish into thin air. Suddenly, the “existential threat” we were facing was “neo-nationalism,” “illiberalism,” or the pejorative designator du jour, “populism.”
Here we are, two and a half years later, and “democracy” is under constant attack by a host of malevolent “populist” forces …. Russo-fascist Black vote suppressors, debaucherous eau de Novichok assassins, Bernie Sanders, the yellow-vested French, emboldened non-exploding mail bomb bombers, Jeremy Corbyn’s Nazi Death Cult, and brain-devouring Russian-Cubano crickets.
The President of the United States is apparently both a Russian intelligence operative and literally the resurrection of Hitler. NBC and MSNBC have been officially merged with the CIA. The Guardian has dispensed with any pretense of journalism and is just making stories up out of whole cloth. Anyone who has ever visited Russia, or met with a Russian, or read a Russian novel, is on an “Enemies of Democracy” watch list (as is anyone refusing to vacation in Israel, which the Senate is now in the process of making mandatory for all U.S. citizens). Meanwhile, the “terrorists” are nowhere to be found, except for the terrorists we’ve been usingto attempt to overthrow the government of Bashar al Assad, the sadistic nerve-gassing Monster of Syria, who illegally invaded and conquered his own country in defiance of the “international community.”
All this madness has something to do with “populism,” although it isn’t clear what. The leading theory is that the Russians are behind it. They’ve got some sort of hypno-technology (not to be confused with those brain-eating crickets) capable of manipulating the minds of … well, Black people, mostly, but not just Black people. Obviously, they are also controlling the French, who they have transformed into “racist, hate-filled liars” who are “attacking elected representatives, journalists, Jews, foreigners, and homosexuals,” according to French President Emmanuel Macron, the anointed “Golden Boy of Europe.” More terrifying still, Putin is now able to project words out of Trump’s mouth in real-time, literally using Trump’s head as a puppet, or like one of those Mission Impossible masks. (Rachel Maddow conclusively proved this by spending a couple of hours on Google comparing the words coming out of Trump’s mouth to words that had come out of Russian mouths, but had never come out of American mouths, which they turned out to be the exact same words, or pretty close to the exact same words!) Apparently, Putin’s master plan for Total Populist World Domination and Establishment of the Thousand Year Duginist Reich was to provoke the global capitalist ruling classes, the corporate media, and their credulous disciples into devolving into stark raving lunatics, or blithering idiots, or a combination of both.
But, seriously, all that actually happened back in the Summer of 2016 was the global capitalist ruling classes recognized that they had a problem. The problem that they recognized they had (and continue to have, and are now acutely aware of) is that no one is enjoying global capitalism … except the global capitalist ruling classes. The whole smiley-happy, supranational, neo-feudal corporate empire concept is not going over very well with the masses, or at least not with the unwashed masses. People started voting for right-wing parties, and Brexit, and other “populist” measures (not because they had suddenly transformed into Nazis, but because the Right was acknowledging and exploiting their anger with the advance of global neoliberalism, while liberals and the Identity Politics Left were slow jamming the TPP with Obama and babbling about transgender bathrooms, and such).
The global capitalist ruling classes needed to put a stop to that (i.e, the “populist” revolt, not the bathroom debate). So they suspended the Global War on Terror and launched the War on Populism. It was originally only meant to last until Hillary Clinton’s coronation, or the second Brexit referendum, then switch back to the War on Terror, but … well, weird things happen, and here we are.
We’ll get back to the War on Terror, eventually … as the War on Populism is essentially just a temporary rebranding of it. In the end, it’s all the same counter-insurgency. When a system is globally hegemonic, as our current model of capitalism is, every war is a counter-insurgency (i.e., a campaign waged against an internal enemy), as there are no external enemies to fight. The “character” of the internal enemies might change (e.g., “Islamic terrorism,” “extremism,” “fascism,” “populism,” “Trumpism,” “Corbynism,” et cetera) but they are all insurgencies against the hegemonic system … which, in our case, is global capitalism, not the United States of America.
The way I see it, the global capitalist ruling classes now have less than two years to put down this current “populist” insurgency. First and foremost, they need to get rid of Trump, who despite his bombastic nativist rhetoric is clearly no “hero of the common people,” nor any real threat to global capitalism, but who has become an anti-establishment symbol, like a walking, talking “fuck you” to both the American and global neoliberal elites. Then, they need to get a handle on Europe, which isn’t going to be particularly easy. What happens next in France will be telling, as will whatever becomes of Brexit … which I continue to believe will never actually happen, except perhaps in some purely nominal sense.
And then there’s the battle for hearts and minds, which they’ve been furiously waging for the last two years, and which is only going to intensify. If you think things are batshit crazy now (which, clearly, they are), strap yourself in. What is coming is going to make COINTELPRO look like the work of some amateur meme-freak. The neoliberal corporate media, psy-ops like Integrity Initiative, Internet-censoring apps like NewsGuard, ShareBlue and other David Brock outfits, and a legion of mass hysteria generators will be relentlessly barraging our brains with absurdity, disinformation, and just outright lies (as will their counterparts on the Right, of course, in case you thought that they were any alternative). It’s going to get extremely zany.
The good news is, by the time it’s all over and Trump has been dealt with, and normality restored, and the working classes put back in their places, we probably won’t remember that any of this happened. We’ll finally be able to sort out those bathrooms, and get back to paying the interest on our debts, and to living in more or less constant fear of an imminent devastating terrorist attack … and won’t that be an enormous relief?
- Chinese Super Soldiers Are Using These Futuristic Weapons
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is equipping its special forces with futuristic combat weapons like CornerShot-like pistols, knife guns, and grenade-launching assault rifles.
PLA special forces are being groomed into “super soldiers” to meet the requirements of the modern battlefield, according to Global Times.
The wide variety of advanced guns are being deployed with the Xuefeng Special Operation Brigade under the PLA 76th Group Army, CGTN News reported on Monday.
The CornerShot-like pistol system allows its operator to both see and attack the enemy, without exposing them to a counterattack. In dangerous urban warfare, the new system allows the operator to accurately shoot around a wall without exposing them to hostile threats, the report said.
China has manufactured three CornerShot-like weapons to date: the HD-66, which is a replica of the CornerShot, and the CF-06. Both models were unveiled at the 4th China Police Expo by Chongqing Changfeng Machinery and Shanghai Sea Shield Technologies.
The third one, known as the CS/LW9, was developed and manufactured by the China Ordnance Industry Research Institute in 2005. It has a handle at the bottom that can be used to turn the LW9 around corners.
All three systems use the QSZ-92 as the primary pistol.
Neither Global Times or CGTN News clarified which CornerShot-like pistol was deployed to PLA special forces.
Another futuristic combat weapon PLA forces are using is the knife gun. It hides the bullets inside what seems to be a knife, which can be fired in close combat environments, the report said.
The last weapon is the grenade-launching assault rifle, also known as the Individual Comprehensive Operation System QTS-11, is an air burst grenade launcher integrated with the QBZ-03 assault rifle that has been in service with the PLA since 2015, according to the report.
“With these weapons, super soldiers capable of 1 vs. 10 will be created,” Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military analyst, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
CGTN News said it is rare for these advanced weapons to be broadcasted on television.
“Training using these sci-fi weapons shows that related technologies are very mature,” Wei said.
“The weapons are made for special forces… Some standard troops will also use them in the future,” he added, adding that these high-tech weapons will remain exclusive to special forces due to high costs.
For now, these weapons are being used in special force combat units to further the PLA’s modernization efforts, CGTN News concluded.
- Trump Concealed Details Of Putin Encounters From His Own Administration: WaPo
One day after the New York Times resurrected the dying Trump-Russia narrative with a report that the FBI supercharged their collusion investigation after President Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey (on the recommendation of Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein), the Washington Post has tossed another match on the pyre – reporting that Trump went to lengths to conceal his communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said. –WaPo
The Post says that Trump concealed the details of a 2017 meeting in Hamburg attended by former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, which was only discovered when a senior State Department official queried the interpreter for information beyond a readout shared by Tillerson.
According to the Post, Trump engaged in a “broader pattern” of shielding his communications with Putin from public scrutiny “and preventing even high-ranking officials in his own administration from fully knowing what he has told one of the United States’ main adversaries.”
Perhaps Trump – who has been subject to unauthorized leaks of sensitive discussions ever since he took office – including a phone call with the former President of Mexico, grew distrustful of his inner circle and has been trying to manage the flow of information throughout the White House. On the other hand, any President meeting with an adversarial world leader at five locations over the past two years and then actively working to shield those conversations from his own inner circle is bound to attract suspicion.
I’d only emphasize that, whatever you think about the topic of the Mueller investigation, for any president to meet substantively with a foreign leader without his own aides, or other leaders, as witnesses is a very bad idea, simply for the effective conduct of US foreign policy.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) July 3, 2018
As a result of Trump’s actions, US officials say there is no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump’s face-to-face meetings with Putin. And the left is already running with this as a case of Kremlin leverage – much as they did with the Steele Dossier’s unverified claims that the Kremlin had tapes of Trump engaging in deviant sexual behavior in a Moscow hotel room.
Correction: There is one detailed classified record of Trump’s numerous conversations with Vladimir Putin. It’s in the Kremlin.
Trump is desperate to keep the details of his conversations with Putin secret. To what lengths would he go for Putin not to make them public? https://t.co/5g2FaGIhbH
— John Aravosis 🇺🇸 (@aravosis) January 12, 2019
According to former Bill Clinton’s former deputy secretary of state and former Brookings Institution president Strobe Talbott, Trump’s secrecy surrounding his interactions with Putin “is not only unusual by historical standards, it is outrageous.” Talbot participated in over a dozen meetings with Clinton and then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s. “It handicaps the U.S. government — the experts and advisers and Cabinet officers who are there to serve [the president] — and it certainly gives Putin much more scope to manipulate Trump,” added Talbott.
White House Responds
Responding to the Post, the White House said that the Trump administration had only sought to “improve the relationship with Russia” after the Obama administration “pursued a flawed ‘reset’ policy that sought engagement for the sake of engagement.”
The Trump administration “has imposed significant new sanctions in response to Russian malign activities,” said the spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity and noted that Tillerson in 2017 “gave a fulsome readout of the meeting immediately afterward to other U.S. officials in a private setting, as well as a readout to the press.”
Trump allies said the president thinks the presence of subordinates impairs his ability to establish a rapport with Putin, and that his desire for secrecy may also be driven by embarrassing leaks that occurred early in his presidency. –WaPo
Trump launched an internal leak hunt after the Post reported in May of 2017 that he revealed classified information about a terror plot to Russian officials in the Oval Office, and called former FBI director James Comey a “nut job,” whose firing had removed “great pressure” on his relationship with Russia.
In addition to the leak hunt, the White House sharply curtailed the distribution of memos within the National Security Council on Trump’s interactions with foreign leaders.
“Over time it got harder and harder, I think, because of a sense from Trump himself that the leaks of the call transcripts were harmful to him,” said one WaPo source.
Democrats frothing at the mouth
Congressional Democratic leaders have described the secrecy surrounding Trump’s meetings with Putin as “unprecedented and disturbing,” and have vowed to investigate.
Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview that his panel will form an investigative subcommittee whose targets will include seeking State Department records of Trump’s encounters with Putin, including a closed-door meeting with the Russian leader in Helsinki last summer.
“It’s been several months since Helsinki and we still don’t know what went on in that meeting,” Engel said. “It’s appalling. It just makes you want to scratch your head.” –WaPo
The Post suggests that the concerns have been compounded by pro-Russia positions Trump has taken; dismissing Russian election interference as a “hoax,” and suggesting that Russia was entitled to annex Crimea.
That said, the Post fails to mention the vast sanctions Trump has slapped Russia with, the weapons Trump has sold to Ukraine that the Obama administration wouldn’t (for which WaPo commended him ) – and more recently, Trump’s threat to sanction European businesses that buy energy from Russia, which drew a harsh rebuke from the German Committee on East European Relations.
Trump generally has allowed aides to listen to his phone conversations with Putin, although Russia has often been first to disclose those calls when they occur and release statements characterizing them in broad terms favorable to the Kremlin.
In an email, Tillerson said that he “was present for the entirety of the two presidents’ official bilateral meeting in Hamburg,” but declined to discuss the meeting and did not respond to questions about whether Trump had instructed the interpreter to remain silent or had taken the interpreter’s notes.
In a news conference afterward, Tillerson said that the Trump-Putin meeting lasted more than two hours, covered the war in Syria and other subjects, and that Trump had “pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement” in election interference. “President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past,” Tillerson said. –WaPo
Meanwhile, Trump’s interpreter has refused to discuss Trump’s interactions with Putin – though he conceeded that Putin denied any Russian involvement in the US election, and that Trump said “I believe you.”
“We were frustrated because we didn’t get a readout,” said a former senior administration official. “The State Department and [National Security Council] were never comfortable” with Trump’s interactions with Putin, the official said. “God only knows what they were going to talk about or agree to.”
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