- Marine Le Pen Says Leaving The Euro "No Longer A Priority"
Though they have calmed somewhat since they first erupted late last year, the Yellow Vest protests are set to continue this week as French President Emmanuel Macron’s offerings of olive branches in the form of rolling back a planned gas-tax hike (the original impetus for the protests), promising to blow out the deficit to offer more government benefits and even abandoning plans to go to Davos have done little to quiet the public outrage over his “presidency for the rich.”
And as his popularity drops to unprecedented lows, polls suggest that the party of his former rival for the presidency, the National Rally party’s Marine Le Pen, has overtaken Macron’s “En Marche” in popularity. And as Le Pen and her fellow pan-European populists organize to mount a credible challenge to the Brussels establishment during the upcoming European Parliamentary elections in May, Le Pen is making a notable pivot in her party’s platform, presumably to try and make it more appealing to more centrist Europeans.
According to RT France, Le Pen told the press on Thursday that leaving the euro – once a hallmark of her party’s position – was “no longer a priority” for National Rally.
“Unquestionably, the euro is a blow for France” but out “is no longer a priority,” Le Pen said Thursday, advocating a change in monetary governance of the European Union.
“If we change the monetary” governance and “we see that it is sufficient to allow the French economy to recover the handicaps that have been created by the currency, we will keep the change. We are pragmatic, we are not ideologues,” said the president of the National Assembly in the margins of her wishes to the press at the headquarters of his party in Nanterre.
Though opposing the euro will no longer be a priority, Le Pen had some disparaging words for the European Central Bank, a sign that she is pivoting to an economically populist agenda targeting inequality and immigration. Instead of directing its policies to the benefit of European workers, the ECB’s focus on inflation has led it to a monetary stimulus policy that has helped widen inequality.
“The governance that has been chosen and which aims for the ECB [European Central Bank] to fight only against inflation and to refuse to fight against unemployment, poses a real problem,” said the finalist of the presidential election in 2017.
“Money creation by the EU, instead of being sent to agencies to invest in the real economy or even directly to states…is for banks and is lost, diluted in the virtual economy,” she said.
Instead of focusing on leaving the euro, Le Pen would rather RN focus on border sovereignty and economic issues like the French budget, a position that echoes that of Italy’s populist leaders, who recently faced down the EU and won permission to blow out the country’s budget deficit.
- Paul Craig Roberts: The National Security Agency Is A Criminal Organization
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Years before Edward Snowden provided documented proof that the National Security Agency was really a national insecurity agency as it was violating law and the US Constitution and spying indiscriminately on American citizens, William Binney, who designed and developed the NSA spy program revealed the illegal and unconstitutional spying.
Binney turned whistleblower, because NSA was using the program to spy on Americans. As Binney was well known to the US Congress, he did not think he needed any NSA document to make his case. But what he found out was:
“Congress would never hear me because then they’d lose plausible deniability. That was really their key. They needed to have plausible deniability so they can continue this massive spying program because it gave them power over everybody in the world. Even the members of Congress had power against others [in Congress]; they had power on judges on the Supreme Court, the federal judges, all of them.
That’s why they’re so afraid. Everybody’s afraid because all this data that’s about them, the central agencies — the intelligence agencies — they have it. And that’s why Senator Schumer warned President Trump earlier, a few months ago, that he shouldn’t attack the intelligence community because they’ve got six ways to Sunday to come at you. That’s because it’s like J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids. . . . it’s leverage against every member of parliament and every government in the world.”
To prevent whistle-blowing, NSA has “a program now called ‘see something, say something’ about your fellow workers.”
“That’s what the Stasi did. That’s why I call [NSA] the new New Stasi Agency. They’re picking up all the techniques from the Stasi and the KGB and the Gestapo and the SS. They just aren’t getting violent yet that we know of – internally in the US, outside is another story.”
As Binney had no documents to give to the media, blowing the whistle had no consequence for NSA. This is the reason that Snowden released the documents that proved NSA to be violating both law and the Constitution, but the corrupt US media focused blame on Snowden as a “traitor” and not on NSA for its violations.
Whistleblowers are protected by federal law. Regardless, the corrupt US government tried to prosecute Binney for speaking out, but as he had taken no classified document, a case could not be fabricated against him.
Binney blames the NSA’s law-breaking on Dick “Darth” Cheney. He says NSA’s violations of law and Constitution are so extreme that they would have to have been cleared at the top of the government.
Binney, who developed the spy network, explains that it was supposed to operate only against foreign enemies, and that using it for universal spying so overloads the system with data that the system fails to discover many terrorist activities.
Apparently, the National Security Agency values being able to blackmail citizens and members of government at home and abroad more than preventing terrorist attacks.
Unfortunately for Americans, there are many Americans who blindly trust the government and provide the means, the misuse of which is used to enslave us. A large percentage of the work in science and technology serves not to free people but to enslave them. By now there is no excuse for scientists and engineers not to know this. Yet they persist in their construction of the means to destroy liberty.
- Chinese Property Developers Implode As Market Freaks Out Over $55 Billion Debt Cliff
Earlier this month, when we reported that in the latest warning about China’s housing sector, the Communist Party’s People’s Daily warned that China’s regional economies need to reduce their reliance on the property market for growth and instead focus on sustainable longer-term development, we wondered if “something was afoot with China’s housing sector.”
The story is familiar: in recent year, hundreds of cities across China have seen upswings in their local property markets under a long-term plan by Beijing to further urbanize the country. The process of building new homes and revamping old ones has only accelerated in the last few years, backed by local governments keen to boost land sales and meet red-hot property demand. Indeed, the total sales of China’s top 100 real estate developers soared 35% last year. But repeating a now familiar warning that the party is over, Beijing has once again expressed concern that some cities, looking for rapid expansion, have grown their property markets too quickly and at the expense of new industry development, adding potential froth to real estate prices.
Two weeks later, our concern that something is not quite well with China’s housing sector was validated by the market overnight when shares in Jiayuan International, a prominent Chinese property developer, imploded in late trading in Hong Kong on Thursday, its stock collapsing 81% due to investor unease over a sector that is staggering under vast debts just as the world’s second-biggest economy slows.
According to analysts, all of whom were dumbfounded by today’s move, said that the stock, which flash crashed after a chaotic day’s trading that wiped more than $3 billion from its market capitalisation with the selling promptly spilling over to many of its peers…
… was engulfed by concern that Jiayuan would default on a $350 million bond that matures this week.
As we reported earlier this morning, the panic liquidation over Jiayuan also ensnared rival property company Sunshine 100 China Holdings, whose shares plunged 65% moments after Jiayuan’s collapse when traders realized that the two companies share a director.
“Some of these companies might have cross-shareholdings in each other and when one of those starts to tumble, it brings down other related stocks,” said Bocom strategist Hao Hong. “It’s likely more similar stock crashes could happen this year. A lot of share pledges in Hong Kong are underwater, and as soon as the positions are liquidated it triggers an avalanche.“
The property development sector has become especially vulnerable to sharp selloffs as it has accumulated large amounts of dollar debt, while the flagging Chinese economy has boosted fears about future prospects for China’s housing sector in what may end up being the country’s first hard landing in decades.
But the biggest problem is the upcoming debt cliff, which will force the sector to refinance at the worst possible time: according to the Financial Times, Chinese developers have about $55 billion of maturing onshore debt in 2019, which as discussed this morning accentuates concern over potential defaults.
The sector is under pressure because of “potential concern over bond defaults, as [the companies] have offshore funding coming due,” said Morningstar analyst Phillip Zhong. As a result “the cost of refinancing is quite expensive.”
In hopes of reversing the market panic, the company published a statement on its website after the Hong Kong stock market closed on Thursday, in which Jiayuan said that it had repaid the $350 million bond, adding that “its current financial situation is healthy and business operations is normal.”
Clearly the market did not agree, although what exactly caused the stock to lose 80% of its value in one day remains a mystery, because while traders blamed everything from massive leverage, to stock pledges, to some variation of cross-asset holdings and interlinked collateral for the latest flash crash, the reality is that nobody really knows what happened as Castor Pang, head of research at Core Pacific-Yamaichi confirmed: “No one really knows what’s going on here. For common investors, it’s a very surprising and tough situation as there was no time to get out.”
* * *
The bigger problem, beside the “avalanche” of overnight Hong Kong flash crashes is that after a boom in recent years, China’s property market is cooling, with developers forced to announce sharp price to move inventory, in the process leading to public anger over a sharp drop in prevailing prices. As we reported in October, this led to homeowners protesting in the streets last year in several large cities to demand refunds after developers cut prices to stimulate sales.
And then there is the issue of the $55 billion in coming property developer debt maturities which risks to blow up the local debt market as rates gradually rise. Refinancing maturing debt “has always been a concern for lower-rated companies” in the property business, and will be particularly urgent this year given the scale of the debt maturing, said Mr Zhong.
Quoted by the FT, Nicole Wong, an analyst at CLSA, noted that recent stimulus measures by the central bank are “aimed at only the very big [developers]”.
The silver lining is that the overnight crash in property developer shares was not enough to unsettle the wider Hong Kong market, with the benchmark Hang Seng index closing barely down.
Still, traders are growing more nervous that the tipping point is near: Wee Liat Lee, head of financial group and property research in Asia at BNP Paribas, said the issue of systemic risk “is a problem . . . the Chinese economy is pretty dependent on property as a sector, in terms of investment and reliance of local government on land sales and revenue”.
“But I think this is an issue the Chinese government realised a long time ago,” he added. “It’s a structural problem that takes quite a bit of time to unwind.”
Failing that, Beijing will just bail out the entire housing sector as it has done on so many prior occasions. The alternative is the one thing that keeps every politician in Beijing up at night: revolution.
- "Our Country Is In A Hell Hole Right Now": In Profane Tirade, Rapper Cardi B Demands Trump End Shutdown
It’s a rare day when Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gets to feel relevant with the youth culture. But today is one of those days.
In a profanity-laced tirade published on her Instagram account Wednesday night, female rapper-of-the-moment Cardi B railed against the government shutdown and against President Trump for ordering federal workers to return to work without pay, declaring that “our country is in a hellhole right now…all for a f***king wall.”
And while she acknowledged that Obama also shut down the government for two-and-a-half weeks, that was different – because it was for “health care”.
“I just wanna remind you that it’s been a little bit over three weeks…Trump is now ordering … federal government workers to go back to work without getting paid…now I don’t wanna hear y’all talking about how Obama shut down the government for 17 days…yeah b***h, for health care…so your grandma could go check her blood pressure….and y’all bitches could get your p**sy checked out at the gynecologist with no “motherf***king problem.”
“I know y’all don’t care because y’all probably don’t work for the federal government or y’all probably don’t even have a job…but this is serious.”
“Our country is in a hellhole right now, all for a f**king wall…and we really need to take this serious…and we really need to take some action,” Cardi B said. “And honestly I’m scared.”
What kind of action? Cardi can’t say because “that’s not what I do.” But somebody should definitely do something.
Sounding like giddy schoolchildren, several Democratic senators launched into a debate about whether they should retweet the video…with a memorable cameo from the minority leader himself.
Now that Cardi has come out on one side of the issue, it’s only a matter of time until Nicki Minaj comes out in favor of building the wall.
- Trump "Personally Instructed" Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress About Moscow Project: BuzzFeed
President Trump instructed his former longtime attorney Michael Cohen to lie to congress about negotiations to construct a Moscow Trump Tower, according to BuzzFeed, citing two federal law enforcement officials who leaked the information.
Trump also supported a plan hatched by Cohen to visit Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to personally meet Vladimir Putin to see if it would help get the project off the ground. “Make it happen,” Trump allegedly told Cohen.
And even as Trump told the public he had no business deals with Russia, the sources said Trump and his children, Ivanka and Donald Trump Jr., received regular, detailed updates about the real estate development from Cohen, whom they put in charge of the project. –BuzzFeed
According to BuzzFeed, Cohen told special counsel Robert Mueller that after the election, “Trump personally instructed him to lie” – by claiming that the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations had ended months before they actually had. The special counsel’s office also allegedly learned about Trump’s insructions to lie “through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents,” which Cohen reportedly confirmed.
This revelation is not the first evidence to suggest the president may have attempted to obstruct the FBI and special counsel investigations into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.
But Cohen’s testimony marks a significant new frontier: It is the first known example of Trump explicitly telling a subordinate to lie directly about his own dealings with Russia. –BuzzFeed
Trump repeatedly denied having any business interests in Russia while on the campaign trail – while simultaneously pushing for the Moscow project which he hoped could bring the Trump Organization profits in excess of $300 million. According to BuzzFeed, citing “two law enforcement sources,” Trump had at least 10 face-to-face meetings with Cohen about the deal during the election.
Last year, BuzzFeed reported that Cohen associate (and FBI asset) Felix Sater continued to spearhead the Trump Tower Moscow idea through June 2016 – communicating with “Russian bankers, developers, and officials connected to the Kremlin.”
Meanwhile, lawyers close to the Trump administration helped Cohen craft his Congressional testimony, including his draft statement to the Senate panel according to the report. This did not include former White House counsel DOn McGhan, who told BuzzFeed through an attorney: “Don McGahn had no involvement with or knowledge of Michael Cohen’s testimony. Nor was he aware of anyone in the White House Counsel’s Office who did.”
Following Cohen’s guilty plea, the special counsel’s office filed a memo in court vouching for his “credible” and “useful” information during seven interviews – adding that Cohen had provided details about his contacts with “persons connected to the White House” in 2017 and 2018.
According to BuzzFeed‘s law enforcement sources, Cohen confirmed that Trump directed him to lie to Congress, and that he had provided details of his conversations regarding Trump Tower Moscow with Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Ivanka Trump – all three of whom have distanced themselves from the issue, claiming they had little knowledge of the negotiations.
Ivanka, however, was set to manage a spa at the tower and personally recommended an architect, according to the report. She also instructed Cohen to discuss the project with a Russian athlete who offered “synergy on a government level” in order to get the project moving. Cohen reportedly rebuffed Ivanka’s suggestion to meet with the athlete, angering Ivanka according to emails reviewed by BuzzFeed.
But a picture of their deep involvement is now emerging, as FBI agents and prosecutors pore over witness interviews and internal documents from Cohen and other Trump Organization officials and executives.
Trump was even made aware that Cohen was speaking to Russian government officials about the deal. The lawyer at one point spoke to a Kremlin aide as he sought support for the tower.
Trump also encouraged Cohen to plan a trip to Russia during the campaign, where the candidate could meet face-to-face with Putin. –BuzzFeed
Felix Sater, meanwhile, – a real estate developer, convicted felon and longtime asset for US intelligence agencies, tried to arrange a trip for Cohen to the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum where he was to meet with top Russian government officials and bankers. In order to advance the deal, Cohen told Sater that Trump himself would also go to Russia after the Republican National Convention in July 2016.
Of course, buried towards the end of the story BuzzFeed notes “The trip to St. Petersburg never took place and the plans to build Trump Tower Moscow never came tor fruition.”
That said, “the negotiations occupy an important place in Mueler’s investigation, as agents try to learn whether it is connected to the Kremlin’s interferene campaign and whom Trump associates were in contact with to close the deal.”
Trump, in his defense of the project, stated last November “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?”
Meanwhile, big questions remain over how involved Trump’s children were in the project.
A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s attorney wrote that she was only “minimally involved” in the project. “Ms. Trump did not know about this proposal until after a non-binding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, never visited the prospective project site and, even internally, was only minimally involved,” wrote Peter Mirijanian.
Donald Trump Jr., meanwhile, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 7, 2017, that he was only “peripherally aware” of the plan to build a tower in Moscow. “Most of my knowledge has been gained since as it relates to hearing about it over the last few weeks.”
The two law enforcement sources disputed this characterization and said that he and Cohen had multiple, detailed conversations on this subject during the campaign. –BuzzFeed
Cohen is set to testify publicly before the Democrat controlled House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on February 7.
- American "Liberal" Delusions On Trump
Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The anti-Trump so-called “liberal” American politicians and media suffer from a cozy big delusion. The Democrats and their supportive media, such as CNN and New York Times, as well as the foreign policy establishment, including the CIA, promote the belief that all of America’s ills and problems will be solved if only President Trump could be impeached.
The so-called “liberal-left” in the US – which has nothing to do with leftwing or socialist politics as most of the world would define it – is increasingly warning that Trump is taking America into a dark place of authoritarianism.
Take a recent op-ed in the New York Times by columnist Roger Cohen with the headline: ‘Donald Trump Just Cannot Help It’. It’s a scathing piece which lambasts Trump in very personal terms as a “malignant” conman.
The key line perhaps is when Cohen writes: “The Reichstag Fire was at least a fire. Here, there is smoke and mirrors.” He is referring to what many historians contend was a false-flag arson attack on the German parliament in 1933, which allowed newly elected Chancellor Adolf Hitler to install his Nazi dictatorship by claiming the sabotage was a communist plot.
Many critics of Trump, including Cohen, are concerned that the president is “manufacturing a crisis” over his border wall proposal. They accuse him of using the US government shutdown and the political impasse with Democrats on the proposed border wall funding as a pretext to introduce a state of emergency. Cohen’s mention of the infamous Reichstag Fire has therefore a seemingly radical inference. He, and many others in the American liberal-left, are warning that Trump is a crypto-fascist.
There is some merit to that argument. Certainly, Trump seems to be whipping up a crisis about immigration which is not justified in terms of numbers and conditions on the border with Mexico. The influx of migrants and refugees is widely reported to be at an all-time low going back over the past 40 years. Most of the present migrants are families, fleeing poverty and violence in their home countries. Trump’s scary depiction of “drug dealers” and “terrorists” seems to be unabashed fabulation to incite fear.
His threats of invoking a state of emergency in which he will use executive powers to instruct the compulsory building of a security barriers on the southern border are therefore disproportionate and uncalled for. Trump’s would-be arrogation of emergency powers has disturbing implications of overriding US constitutional law, and sidelining other branches of government. There are genuine concerns that the direction is one of authoritarianism, even fascism.
But here is where too many Americans are deluded about Trump. They think he is the singular problem, an aberrant president. Get rid of him, they say, and we can all return to “normal democracy”.
The reality is that the US has been sliding into authoritarianism, plutocracy and oligarchy, or dare we say fascism, for decades. The political figure of Trump – obnoxious as he is – is merely the culmination of this degenerative process in American politics.
The obscenity of American capitalism and its grotesque exploitation of millions of American citizens – creating islands of super wealth among a sea of poverty – is a repudiation of any notion of a functioning democracy. The two-party pimping for big business, Wall Street and the military-industrial racket that has been going on for decades makes a travesty of any claims about “we the people” and elections. This backdrop of actual functioning oligarchy is why many voters – among the half, that is, who bothered to even vote – reached out to “an outsider” like Trump and his conman promises of change.
However, the inherent problem isn’t Trump. It is the system that produces the conditions and precursors for someone like Trump to end up getting elected.
It should be noted that people like Roger Cohen and other American “liberals” who are wringing their hands about Trump never seemed to express concern about the dominance of big business and banks in running America’s corporatocracy. Cohen and his ilk were also big supporters of US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – wars that were illegal, resulted in millions of innocent casualties, destroyed societies and spread the scourge of terrorism.
How is getting rid of Trump supposed to be a return to “normal democracy”? When that purported “normal democracy” is a myth, a fantasy belied by massive poverty, inequality and oppression of ordinary American workers and their families, alongside criminal imperialist wars of genocide.
Cohen’s reference to the Reichstag Fire false flag and Trump’s propensity for authoritarianism may sound like radical criticism. But it is only radical schtick. It is worse than Trump’s con artistry because it propagates the delusion that America has an underlying democracy. The reality is American democracy stopped functioning a long time ago.
When exactly it stopped is debatable…
The 9/11 “terror attacks” in 2001 were certainly a candidate for comparison to the Reichstag Fire false flag event. They ushered in executive powers in Washington to wage criminal wars “against terrorism” anywhere on the planet, and for far-reaching police state surveillance of US citizens.
Or we could go back to the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 when the US created a pretext for the Vietnam War.
Or the assassination of President John F Kennedy in Dallas in November 1963 by his Deep State enemies, which was a coup d’état against American democracy, violating the nation forever.
Or the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 which gave private banks and plutocrats the ultimate power over the creation of money in the US and thus a veto on economic policy.
Many other instances (extermination of native Americans, African slavery) could be cited which testify to the fraud of “American democracy”. The seeds of authoritarianism, militarism and fascism were sown decades ago. To blame this putrefaction of democracy on Donald Trump is the delusion of American apologists for the system’s long-time corruption.
- New US Intelligence Study: China "Already Leads The World” In Key Weapons Technologies
A newly released Pentagon unclassified intelligence report authored by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) comes to some shocking and alarming conclusions concerning China’s rapid advances in advanced military technology in answer to the question: “What are Beijing’s strategic intentions?”
The report finds that as a result of “acquiring technology by any means available” — especially in the areas of naval and missile systems, including intermediate range missiles and hypersonic weapons, capable of allowing missiles to travel at many times the speed of sound — China’s defense tech is not only at the cutting edge but “In some areas, it already leads the world.”
The “by any means available” charge leveled at Beijing is a reference to what American political leaders and businesses have slammed as unfair Chinese domestic laws forcing foreign partners to divulge secrets as the cost of doing business in China, with its massive population and ever expanding markets.
The 140-page DIA report is titled simply “China Military Power” and the introduction presents the thesis and purpose of the study according to the following central questions:
“What do we need to know about China?” What is China’s vision of the world and its role in it? What are Beijing’s strategic intentions and what are the implications for Washington? How are the PLA’s roles and missions changing as it becomes a more capable military force?
For over a year Pentagon officials and Washington defense planners have been sounding the alarm over the US rival’s rapidly advancing pace of weapons tech and research.
Gen. Paul Selva, vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs last year warned concerning China’s advances in hypersonic missiles: “If we just sit back and don’t react we will lose our technological superiority” over China, Selva said at a think tank event last June.
The new Pentagon study confirms these warnings by concluding:
“The result of this multifaceted approach to technology acquisition is a PLA (People’s Liberation Army) on the verge of fielding some of the most modern weapon systems in the world.”
The report notes further that the PLA’s advances in air, sea and space, including in cyberspace and cybersecurity, will “enable China to impose its will in the region.”
Photo from Defense Intelligence Agency 2019 China Military Power report. This comes at a moment when tensions are soaring over the Taiwan question, which China sees as part of its territory. This week a high level Chinese military official, General Li Zuocheng, told the head of the United States Navy, Admiral John Richardson, in a face to face meeting that Beijing would defend its claim to Taiwan “at any cost”.
And according to The Guardian China’s new confidence and willingness to defend the claims has Pentagon leaders worried:
Speaking to Pentagon reporters, a senior defense intelligence official said he was worried China’s military is now advanced enough that PLA generals could feel confident they could invade Taiwan.
“The biggest concern is that as a lot of these technologies mature… [China] will reach a point where internally within their decision-making they will decide that using military force for a regional conflict is something that is more imminent,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
Also of note is that the DIA report comments on China’s rapidly developing stealth bomber program “capable of striking regional and global targets.”
The report says the advanced jets could enter operational use by 2025 in what would be another huge milestone for the PLA, and of extreme worry to a US military committed to continued sailing through the Taiwan Strait and other “international waters” routes near China.
- United States Doesn't Even Make Top 20 On Global Democracy Index
Authored by Andrea Germanos via CommonDreams.org,
Nation classified as a “flawed democracy”…
A new index released this week offers a sobering look at how democracy is faring in the United States.
According to the 2018 edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the U.S. doesn’t even make the list of top 20—its demonstrably “flawed democracy” notching it the 25th spot.
The ranking is based on 60 indicators spanning five interrelated categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Each category gets a 0-10 score, with the final score being the average of those five.
Topping out the index are Norway, Iceland, Sweden, New Zealand, and Denmark. They are each declared “full democracies,” as their scores, all above 9.22, were easily above the 8.2 threshold. With a final score of 7.96, the United States, in contrast, earned the “flawed democracy” label. The country’s highest score was 8.22, which it earned back in 2006 and again in 2008.
North America still holds the claim for the highest average score of any region, but that’s thanks to Canada’s 9.15, which landed it the number 6 spot overall. Twenty countries (12 percent) were designated as full democracies, 14 of which are located in Western Europe.
Rounding out the bottom of the list, meanwhile, are Chad, the Central African Republican, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Syria, and North Korea, with scores identifying them as “authoritarian regimes.”
In the United States, according to the analysis:
Most of the major policy actions in 2018—including the escalation of the trade war with China; diplomatic engagement with North Korea; and extensive deregulation of the energy, mining, and automotive industries—have not required congressional approval. Moreover, [President Donald] Trump has repeatedly called into question the independence and competence of the U.S. judicial system with regard to the ongoing federal investigation, led by Robert Mueller, into potential ties between Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia, and various courts’ efforts to block some of his policy orders, particularly regarding immigration. Although we expect the U.S. system of checks and balances to remain intact, this internal conflict risks further undermining public confidence in institutions. As a result, the score for political culture declined in the 2018 index.
The analysis also found that the political participation category overall is on the rise, halting the three-year trend of a decline in the Democracy Index. For that, thanks go to women. From the new report:
In fact, in the past decade, of all 60 indicators in the Democracy Index, women’s political participation has improved more than any other single indicator in our model. Formal and informal barriers to women’s political participation, including discriminatory laws and socioeconomic obstacles, are gradually being knocked down.
[…] In perhaps the most notable advance in women’s participation in 2018, quotas proved unnecessary; in the wake of the U.S. mid-term election in November 2018, participation of women in Congress reached an all-time high of 20.3 percent. This is just above the top threshold in our model, which sits at just 20 percent, reflecting the historical reality of extremely limited female legislative representation.
Still, there’s not cause for breaking out the champagne just yet. While the index didn’t decline overall, it didn’t improve either. In addition, the analysis found that global disillusionment with the functioning of government continued as did a decline in civil liberties.
- Is Facebook's "10 Year Challenge" A Ploy To Teach Facial Recognition Algorithms
If you have been on social media recently, you’ve likely been subjected to the “10 year challenge”, a growing trend of people posting photos of themselves from 10 years ago and comparing themselves to current photos. Like most social media “challenges”, it isn’t much of a “challenge” at all, but rather an excuse for insecure social media users to post more Snapchat and Instagram-filtered photos of themselves in hopes of proving to the world that their life has deep meaning beyond, well, being constantly on Facebook, SnapChat or Instagram.
But one author and expert in the field had a different take: she raised an interesting conspiratorial view that stemmed from a semi sarcastic tweet she put out on January 12. Speaker, entrepreneur and author Kate O’Neill wrote the following:
Me 10 years ago: probably would have played along with the profile picture aging meme going around on Facebook and Instagram
Me now: ponders how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition— Kate O’Neill (@kateo) January 12, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
She then took the time to write an article for Wired that “goes down the rabbit hole” a bit and runs with the conspiracy theory.
O’Neill’s has a background in integrated experience strategy and human-centric digital transformation as a result of her “more than 20 years of experience and entrepreneurship leading innovations across technology, marketing, and operations, developing human-centric, data-guided, and brand-aligned growth and retention strategies for companies of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500s.”
She claims that if you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age related characteristics and age progression, you would want a lot of people’s photos and you would want to know that they were all taken a fixed number of years apart – 10 years, in this case.
There’s certainly the counter-argument that you could mine Facebook data as it stands, making the “challenge” unnecessary, but photos are sometimes put up out of order and often feature images of items that are much more than users: word images, cartoons, patterns, and others. The EXIF data on these photos is also unreliable, as people have uploaded and scanned photographs from different eras at different times.
And so it would help if there was a clean, simple and rigorously labeled set of “then and now” photographs, much like we are seeing with the “10 year challenge”.
O’Neill makes a cogent and objective point: thanks to this meme challenge, there’s an extremely large data set of carefully picked photos of people from roughly 10 years ago and now.
Some people argue that there is too much useless data for this challenge to be useful. But the article makes the argument that people (and arguably a company using this data for nefarious purposes) would know you’re supposed to place more trust in the validity of data earlier on in a trend. This just means that someone would have to be more likely to mine the data that started coming out at the beginning of the challenge. And, by now, algorithms are smart enough to separate human faces from the joke memes that people are putting up, like photos of their cats and dogs.
Facebook denies having any involvement. They told Wired: “This is a user-generated meme that went viral on its own. Facebook did not start this trend, and the meme uses photos that already exist on Facebook. Facebook gains nothing from this meme (besides reminding us of the questionable fashion trends of 2009). As a reminder, Facebook users can choose to turn facial recognition on or off at any time.”
Of course, the idea that the information is being used for nefarious purposes hasn’t been proven and is certainly still a conspiracy theory. But a key point O’Neill tries to get across in her piece certainly isn’t: “humans are the richest data sources for most of the technology emerging in the world”.
You can read the full piece here.
Digest powered by RSS Digest
Saving...