- The Economic Consequences Of The Peace: 100 Years Later
The Economic Consequences Of The Peace: 100 Years Later
Authored by Edward Fuller via The Mises Institute,
Introduction
This week is the hundred-year anniversary of The Economic Consequences of the Peace by John Maynard Keynes. This work has been described as “one of the most influential books of the twentieth century.” It made Keynes the most famous economist in the world, and it was the basis of his massive influence on twentieth-century economics. Many of Keynes’s harshest critics view it as his one good book. However, the case can be made that The Economic Consequences of the Peace is his worst book. On its centenary, it is proper to reassess the work and its influence.
Britain’s War-Debt Problem
To truly understand The Economic Consequences of the Peace, it must be realized that the First World War devastated Britain financially. Britain was the world’s financial superpower prior to 1914, but the war changed this. During the war, Britain assisted her European allies by making massive war loans. At the end of the war, France, Russia, Italy, Belgium, and Serbia were deeply indebted to Britain.
Given the scope of the Great War, however, Britain did not have the financial capacity to finance the Allied war effort by herself. Consequently, the British became totally dependent on the United States for financing. In effect, the British borrowed from the United States and re-lent the money to her riskier allies. According to Keynes, “Almost the whole of England’s indebtedness to the United States was incurred, not on her own account, but to enable her to assist the rest of her Allies.”
At the end of the war, the Allies were heavily indebted to Britain, while Britain was heavily indebted to the United Stated. As Keynes wrote, “the war ended with everyone owing everyone else immense sums of money. … The Allies owe a large sum to Great Britain; and Great Britain owes a large sum to the United States.” In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes estimated the net debt position of the Allies using official Treasury figures.
As the table above shows, the British were in a perilous financial position at the close of the war. Britain had to repay the United States, but the shattered Allies could not repay Britain. This debt-vice is the key to The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
Keynes’s defenders neglect a vital question: who was responsible for orchestrating Britain’s war-debt problem? The answer is Keynes. He started work at the British Treasury in January 1915, and he was transferred to the First Finance Division in May of that year. In May 1917, he became chief of the A Division, newly created to manage all of Britain’s inter-allied lending and borrowing. By the end of the war, he was the third-highest-ranking official in the British Treasury.
Keynes boasted, “I was in the Treasury throughout the war and all the money we lent or borrowed passed through my hands.” He reported, “I happen to have been during the war the Treasury official most directly concerned with the borrowing and the spending of the money.” Roy Harrod, an unabashed defender of Keynes, admits: “He occupied the key position at what was without challenge the centre of the inter-allied economic effort, he thought out the policy, and in effect bore the ultimate responsibility for the decisions.”
Keynes was the British Treasury’s chief representative at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. His overarching goal at the conference was to solve the war-debt problem he had masterminded. As will become clear, his main solution was war-debt cancellation. On November 29, 1918, he submitted an official memorandum called “The Treatment of Inter-Ally Debt Arising out of the War.” Unfortunately, this crucial document was not published in Keynes’s collected writings. The document is reproduced in the appendix below. We read,
At the opening of the Peace Conference, this country should propose to the United States that all debts incurred between the Governments of the Associated countries prior to January 1st, 1919, should be cancelled. … Failing such a settlement the war will end with a net-work of heavy tributes payable from one Ally to another. A certain amount of indemnity will be recoverable from the enemy, but this is likely to be of a less amount than the indemnities which the Allies will be paying to one another. This is an improper conclusion to such a war as the present one. … Indeed, failing a readjustment, the financial sacrifice of the United States will have been disproportionately small, and Germany will be the only Power free from the financial grip of the U.S.
Keynes was obsessed with war-debt cancellation at the conference. His American counterpart, Thomas W. Lamont, reported: “The question [of cancelling war-debts] in one form or another constantly arose. It was always ‘stepped on’ by the American delegates.” Naturally, the Americans violently opposed war-debt cancellation, for it would shift the financial burden of the war from Europe to America. Austen Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote to Keynes:
No doubt it would be a very good thing if the United States would propose or support a universal cancellation of debt, but my information from Paris is that they show no inclination to do anything of the kind. … To propose the mere cancellation of debt looks as if we were trying to shift the whole burden on to America.
Keynes left Paris in June 1919 and published The Economic Consequences of the Peace in December. Again, his main policy was war-debt cancellation. He described the “Settlement of inter-Ally indebtedness” as “an indispensable preliminary.” He wrote,
If all the above Inter-Ally indebtedness were mutually forgiven, the net result on paper (i.e. assuming all the loans to be good) would be a surrender by the United States of about $10,000,000,000 and by the United Kingdom of about $4,500,000,000. France would gain about $3,500,000,000 and Italy about $4,000,000,000. But these figures overstate the loss of the United Kingdom and understate the gain to France. … [T]he relief in anxiety which such a liquidation of the position would carry with it would be very great. It is from the United States, therefore, that the proposal asks generosity.
Keynes was desperate to cancel war debts throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. However, his cancellation scheme was doomed to repeated rejection. The Americans were afraid that the massive losses from cancellation would devastate the US financial system. But Keynes was incapable of seeing the problem from the American perspective. To his insular mind, anything that was good for Britain must be good for the world.
German Reparations
According to the conventional wisdom, Keynes was a great opponent of German reparations. In reality, he was the single most important reparations planner at the Paris Peace Conference.
Before the conference, Keynes split the reparations liability into two parts: (1) an upfront payment and (2) a series of long-term payments made over a period of decades. First, Keynes demanded a large upfront reparations payment from the Germans. His main concern was to obtain Germany’s gold reserves, merchant marine, and imperial possessions. He wrote,
Germany is liable up to the full extent of the injury she has caused to the Allied and Associated Nations. … The Allied and Associated Governments demand accordingly that Germany render payment for the injury which she has caused up to the full limit of her capacity. … Germany shall hand over immediately (a) the whole of her mercantile marine, (b) the whole of her gold and silver coin and bullion in the Reichsbank and all other banks; (c) the whole of the foreign property of her nationals situated outside Germany, including all foreign securities, foreign properties and business and concessions.
On top of the large upfront payment, Keynes recommended imposing a long-term liability. In fact, the evidence shows that Keynes originated the idea of imposing long-term reparations on Germany. He first recommended a long-term liability in a joint memorandum with William J. Ashley dated January 2, 1916 and entitled “Memorandum on the Effect of an Indemnity.” Lloyd George confirmed, “Professor Ashley and Mr. Keynes are thus the joint authors of the long-term indemnity which was incorporated in the Treaty.”
Keynes conceived the plan to impose long-term reparations on the Germans, and he started estimating Germany’s capacity to pay long before the end of the war. But at the conference, he concluded that it was impossible to estimate Germany’s capacity to pay each year. His solution was to leave the amount of reparations unfixed in the treaty. Instead, he called for the establishment of a committee to set the annual reparations bill year by year. In short, it was Keynes’s disastrous idea to not fix the amount of reparations in the treaty.
In the armistice, the Germans agreed to restore the territory they had invaded. Since the entire war on the Western front was fought in France and Belgium, the armistice gave these nations a legal basis for imposing reparations on Germany. By contrast, the Armistice did not entitle Britain to German reparations. Thus, at the conference, the British contrived the notorious war-guilt clause, Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, to provide a legal basis for British claims to reparations. Along with John Foster Dulles, Keynes was the author of Article 231.
As noted, Keynes recommended war-debt cancellation in The Economic Consequences of the Peace. This would solve the war-debt problem. But he also advocated imposing short- and long-term reparations on the Germans. This means the reparations he advocated in The Economic Consequences of the Peace were not designed to alleviate Europe’s financial problems. Instead, the reparations were punitive:
(1) The amount of payment to be made by Germany in respect of Reparation and the costs of the Armies of Occupation might be fixed at $10,000,000,000
(2) The surrender of merchant ships … war material … State property … public debt, and Germany’s claims against her former Allies, should be reckoned as worth the lump sum of $2,500,000,000
(3) The balance of $7,500,000,000 should not carry interest pending its repayment, and should be paid by Germany in thirty annual installments of $250,000,000, beginning in 1923.
The Transfer Problem
Clearly, it is absurd to claim that Keynes opposed German reparations; he was the single most important architect of the reparations settlement. Beyond that, he continued advocating German reparations after the treaty. So why is he so commonly considered an opponent of German reparations? The answer is the transfer problem.
Advocates of the transfer problem argued that Germany’s annual reparations payments would stimulate her exports. In this view, Germany could only raise the money needed to pay reparations by exporting her goods abroad. But Britain was Germany’s chief competitor in export markets. To those who believed in the transfer problem, a large annual reparations liability posed a threat to British export industries. Keynes wrote,
Two eventualities have to be sharply distinguished; the first, in which the usual course of trade is not gravely disturbed by the payment. … The second, in which the amount involved is so large that it cannot be paid without a drastic disturbance of the course of trade and a far-reaching stimulation of the exports of the paying country. … An indemnity high enough to absorb the whole of Germany’s normal surplus, for investment abroad and for building up foreign business and connections must certainly be advantageous to this country and correspondingly injurious to the enemy.
Keynes’s belief in the transfer problem led him to play a balancing act. On one hand, he wanted the British to receive enough from Germany each year to cover Britain’s annual debt payments to the United States. On the other, he did not want the annual payments to be too large, for this would to stimulate German exports at Britain’s expense. To Keynes, the best strategy was
to obtain all the property which can be transferred immediately or over a period of three years, levying this contribution as ruthlessly and completely, so as to ruin entirely for many years to come Germany’s overseas development and her international credit; but having done this … to ask only a small tribute over a term of years.
He wrote later,
We can secure from her moderate [annual] payments, on the sort of scale, for example, on which she might have been building up new foreign investments, without stimulating her exports as a whole to a greater activity than they would enjoy otherwise. This is the correct course for Great Britain from the standpoint of her own self-interest only.
Superficially, it looks like Keynes recommended modest annual payments out of humanitarian concern for the Germans. But once the transfer problem is considered, it is clear that he recommended modest payments to stifle Germany’s international development. Paradoxically, for a believer in the transfer problem, large annual reparations payments would have helped Germany recover from the war. This was not Keynes’s goal, however. Instead, his goal was to prevent Germany from reemerging as an economic rival to the British Empire. He wrote,
We, who are imperialists … think that British rule brings with it an increase of justice, liberty, and prosperity; and we administer our Empire not with a view to our pecuniary aggrandizement. … Germany’s aims are not such. … [S]he looks rather to definite material gains. … [W]e distrust her diplomacy, we distrust her international honesty, we resent her calumnious attitude towards us. She envies our possessions; she would observe no scruple if there was any prospect of depriving us of them. She considers us her natural antagonist. She fears the preponderance of the Anglo Saxon race.
The transfer problem was the economic theory underlying all of Keynes’s work on reparations before, during, and after the Paris Peace Conference. But Keynes’s theory of the transfer problem is a fallacy; the transfer problem does not exist. Even Robert Skidelsky, a zealous Keynesian, confesses, “If we stick to the pure theory of the matter, Keynes was wrong.” Ludwig von Mises explains,
An excess of exports is not a prerequisite for the payment of reparations. The causation, rather, is the other way round. The fact that a nation makes such payments has the tendency to create such an excess of exports. There is no such thing as a “transfer” problem. If the German Government collects the amount needed for the payments (in Reichsmarks) by taxing its citizens, every German taxpayer must correspondingly reduce his consumption either of German or of imported products. In the second case the amount of foreign exchange which otherwise would have been used for the purchase of these imported goods becomes available. In the first case the prices of domestic products drop, and this tends to increase exports and thereby the amount of foreign exchange available. Thus collecting at home the amount of Reichsmarks required for the payment automatically provides the quantity of foreign exchange needed for the transfer. … The inflow of Germany’s payments necessarily rendered the receiving countries’ balance of trade “unfavorable.” Their imports exceeded their exports because they collected the reparations. From the viewpoint of mercantilist fallacies this effect seemed alarming.
The transfer problem is the economic theory on which The Economic Consequences of the Peace is based. However, Keynes’s mercantilist theory of the transfer problem is incorrect. In the end, The Economic Consequences of the Peace was rooted in a tissue of mercantilist fallacies.
Reassessing the Mythology
According to the conventional wisdom, Keynes valiantly resigned from the British delegation in protest against the severe reparations imposed on the German underdogs. As Skidelsky claims, “He resigned in June 1919, just before the Versailles peace treaty was signed, in protest against the allied determination to extract huge reparations from Germany.”27 This rosy interpretation is pure mythology.
Keynes’s significant role in planning for reparations dispels any notion that he resigned over reparations. He recommended imposing a large upfront payment on the Germans; he originated the idea of a long-term indemnity; it was his idea to leave the amount of reparations unfixed in the treaty; and he drafted Article 231. Keynes did not oppose the reparations settlement; he was its chief architect.
More fundamentally, those who assert that Keynes resigned out of concern for Germany seriously misconstrue the man. He was a die-hard British “nationalist.” His overriding concern was to protect and advance the British Empire’s position in the postwar world. It is absurd to argue that Keynes resigned over German problems. Surely, British problems led to his resignation.
So why did Keynes resign? He devised the system of inter-allied war loans, and he understood that his system had passed financial hegemony from Britain to the United States. He wrote in October 1916, “The American executive and the American public will be in a position to dictate to this country.” By 1917, President Wilson recognized that Britain was “financially in our hands” and “when the war is over we can force them to our way of thinking.” Keynes acknowledged that Britain was in the “financial grip of the U.S.” just before the conference:
The sum we ourselves owe to the United States must undoubtedly be regarded as very real debts. … Such a burden will cripple our foreign development in other parts of the world, and will lay us open to future pressure by the United States of a most objectionable description.
Keynes went to the Paris Peace Conference to reclaim Britain’s financial supremacy from the United States. Of course, this meant the Americans were his great opponents at the conference. As Skidelsky admits, “What has not been sufficiently appreciated is the extent to which Keynes was anti-American. … He wanted to keep America out of Europe”. The Paris Peace Conference was just the beginning of Keynes’s failed lifelong crusade to win back Britain’s financial hegemony.
Keynes played the key role in creating Britain’s “difficult and embarrassing” war-debt problem. He went to the conference to solve the problem, but he failed. He resigned in protest against American opposition to war-debt cancellation. In other words, Keynes resigned because he could not solve the war-debt problem he had masterminded.
The Consequences of Keynes
The economic consequences of Keynes’s war-debt problem were significant. Britain’s war-debt plagued her after the war and, in the early 1930s, Keynes advised the British government to default. The government obliged after 1933. The result was the Johnson Act of 1934, which prohibited the United States from making loans to any country in default.
When the Second World War broke out, the Johnson Act prohibited the United States from assisting Britain with war loans. Consequently, Britain became totally dependent on the Lend-Lease Program, and “During World War II, Keynes, from the British Treasury, spearheaded the United Kingdom’s lend-lease financing.” Throughout the war, the United States used the Lend-Lease Program to dismantle the British Empire. Given his central role in the war-debt problem and Lend-Lease, Keynes deserves much credit for the demise of his beloved empire.
Also, the war-debt problem had significant economic consequences internationally. It was a major factor in the trade and currency wars of the 1920s and 1930s. This economic warfare contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s, and it played a neglected role in the outbreak of Second World War. Although many of today’s financial problems are traced to the 1930s and 1940s, they have their ultimate origins in the financial pandemonium created by the First War World. And Keynes was at the center of the chaos.
Like the economic consequences, the political consequences of Keynes were disastrous. As Thomas Lamont put it, Keynes “paved the way for Hitler’s rise.”
Of course, Keynes did not make Hitler inevitable. But he played a significant role in creating the political conditions that made Hitler possible.
German resentment of the Treaty of Versailles was the major cause of Hitler’s rise to power. It was Keynes’s idea to not fix the amount of reparations in the treaty. This gave the Germans an unlimited theoretical liability, and they felt condemned to indefinite slave labor. Keynes’s idea of a “blank check” enraged the Germans, and it was a serious source of German opposition to the treaty.
More importantly, Keynes was a lead author of Article 231 of the treaty, and this clause became the focus of German opposition to the treaty. Article 231 was one of Hitler’s most important propaganda weapons during his rise to power. Given his central role in drafting Article 231, Keynes certainly contributed to the rise of Hitler.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace only incited the Germans after the war. In hindsight, his attack on the treaty was fatally flawed. Regardless, The Economic Consequences of the Peace greatly amplified German opposition to the treaty. By stimulating German opposition to the treaty, Keynes helped launch Hitler into power.
The Economic Consequences of the Peace is not Keynes’s one good book, his saving grace. Rather, it must be considered his most tragic book. No doubt, Keynes knew that he helped set the stage for Hitler. In 1933, he admitted his remorse to the German-born Cambridge historian Elizabeth Wiskemann. Keynes regretted The Economic Consequences of the Peace, and so should we.
On the morning after the German election, I travelled to Basle; it was an exquisite liberation to reach Switzerland. It must have been only a little later that I met Maynard Keynes at some gathering in London. I do wish you had not written that book, I found myself saying (meaning The Economic Consequences, which the Germans never ceased to quote) and then longed for the ground to swallow me up. But he said, simply and gently, So do I.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 23:45 - China's Diplomatic Ties Surge In 2019, Overtaking US
China's Diplomatic Ties Surge In 2019, Overtaking US
With a growing number of nations in the world of the belief that China is now the world’s foremost superpower, America’s hegemonic hold on the world is slipping further as Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details that in 2019, China was the country with the most diplomatic missions, overtaking the U.S..
You will find more infographics at Statista
China can now count 276 posts abroad, including 169 embassies, compared with the U.S.’ 273 foreign diplomatic posts, according to the Lowy Institute.
China has built a far-reaching network of diplomatic missions with some located in isolated places like pacific island nations Vanuatu, Micronesia and French Polynesia – the Chinese mission being the only one in the French overseas territory. Other diplomatic posts have recently opened in Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic and El Salvador – all places China wanted to strengthen its ties with because they were doing a lot of business with Taiwan, according to the BBC.
As recently as 2016, China had been in rank 3, with the U.S. and France ahead. In 2019, there were a total of 3,944 embassies, 1,588 consulates and 414 other diplomatic posts in the world, bringing the total count close to 6,000.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 23:25 - The Real Lesson Of Afghanistan Is That Regime-Change Does Not Work
The Real Lesson Of Afghanistan Is That Regime-Change Does Not Work
Authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies via Counterpunch.org,
The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.
This premise misses the obvious lesson that Washington insiders refuse to learn: the underlying fault is not in how the U.S. tries and fails to reconstruct societies destroyed by its “regime changes,” but in the fundamental illegitimacy of regime change itself. As former Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz told NPR just eight days after 9/11, “It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened.”
The “Lessons Learned” documents reveal the persistent efforts of three administrations to hide their colossal failures behind a wall of propaganda in order to avoid admitting defeat and to keep “muddling along,” as General McChrystal has described it. In Afghanistan, muddling along has meant dropping over 80,000 bombs and missiles, nearly all on people who had nothing to do with the crimes of September 11th, exactly as Ben Ferencz predicted.
How many people have been killed in Afghanistan is contested and essentially unknown. The UN has published minimum confirmed numbers of civilians killed since 2007, but as Fiona Frazer, the UN human rights chief in Kabul, admitted to the BBC in August 2019, “more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth” (but) due to rigorous methods of verification, the published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm.” The UN only counts civilian deaths in incidents where it has completed human rights investigations, and it has little or no access to the remote Taliban-held areas where most U.S. air strikes and “kill or capture” raids take place. So, as Fiona Frazer suggested, the UN’s published figures can be only a fraction of the true numbers of people killed.
It shouldn’t take 18 years for U.S. officials to publicly admit that there is no military solution to a murderous and unwinnable war for which the U.S. is politically and legally responsible. But the debacle in Afghanistan is only one case in a fundamentally flawed U.S. policy with worldwide consequences. New quasi-governments installed by U.S. “regime changes” in country after country have proven more corrupt, less legitimate and less able to control their nation’s territory than the ones the U.S. has destroyed, leaving their people mired in endless violence and chaos that no form of continued U.S. occupation can repair.
“Regime change” is a process of coercion designed to impose the political will of the U.S. government on countries around the world, violating their sovereignty and self-determination with an arsenal of military, economic and political weapons:
1. Delegitimization. The first step in targeting a country for regime change is to delegitimize its existing government in the eyes of U.S. and allied publics, with targeted propaganda or “information warfare” to demonize its president or prime minister. Painting foreign leaders as villains in a personalized Manichean drama psychologically prepares the American public for U.S. coercion to remove them from power. One lesson for those of us opposed to regime change operations is that we must challenge these campaigns at this first stage if we want to prevent their escalation. For example, Russia and China today both have strong defenses, including nuclear weapons, making a U.S. war with either of them predictably catastrophic, or even suicidal. So why is the U.S. stoking a new Cold War against them? Is the military-industrial complex threatening us with extinction only to justify record military budgets? Why is serious diplomacy to negotiate peaceful coexistence and disarmament “off the table,” when it should be an existential priority?
2. Sanctions. Using economic sanctions as a tool to force political change in other countries is deadly and illegal. Sanctions kill people by denying them food, medicine and other basic necessities. UN sanctions killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the 1990s. Today, unilateral U.S. sanctions are killing tens of thousands in Iran and Venezuela. This is illegal under international law, and has been vigorously condemned by UN special rapporteurs. Professor Robert Pape’s research shows that economic sanctions have only achieved political change in 4% of cases. So their main purpose in U.S. policy is to fuel deadly economic and humanitarian crises that can then serve as pretexts for other forms of U.S. intervention.
3. Coups and proxy wars. Coups and proxy wars have long been the weapons of choice when U.S. officials want to overthrow foreign governments. Recent U.S.-backed coups in Honduras, Ukraine and now Bolivia have removed elected governments and installed right-wing U.S.-backed regimes. The U.S. has relied more heavily on coups and proxy wars in the wake of its military disasters in Korea, Vietnam, and now Afghanistan and Iraq, to attempt regime change without the political liability of heavy U.S. military casualties. Under Obama’s doctrine of covert and proxy war, the U.S. worked with Qatari ground forces in Libya, Al Qaeda-linked groups in Syria and militaryleaders in Honduras. But outsourcing regime change to local coup leaders and proxy forces adds even more uncertainty to the outcome, making proxy wars like the one in Syria predictably bloody, chaotic and intractable.
4. Bombing campaigns. U.S. bombing campaigns minimize U.S. casualties but wreak untold and uncounted death and destruction on both enemies and innocents. Like “regime change,” “precision weapons” is a euphemism designed to obscure the horror of war. Rob Hewson, the editor of the arms trade journal Jane’s Air-Launched Weapons, told the AP during the “Shock and Awe” bombing of Iraq in 2003 that the accuracy of U.S. precision weapons was only 75-80%, meaning that thousands of bombs and missiles predictably missed their targets and killed random civilians. As Rob Hewson said. “… you can’t drop bombs and not kill people. There’s a real dichotomy in all of this.” After Mosul and Raqqa were destroyed in the U.S.-led anti-IS campaign that has dropped over 100,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria since 2014, journalist Patrick Cockburn described Raqqa as “bombed to oblivion,” and revealed that Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports had counted at least 40,000 civilians killed in Mosul.
5. Invasion and hostile military occupation. The infamous “last resort” of full-scale war is predicated on the idea that, if nothing else works, the U.S.’s trillion-dollar military can surely get the job done. This dangerous presumption led the U.S. into military quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan despite its previous “lessons learned” in Vietnam, underlining the central unlearned lesson that war itself is a catastrophe. In Iraq, journalist Nir Rosen described the U.S. occupation force as “lost in Iraq…unable to wield any power except on the immediate street corner where it’s located.” Today, about 6,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, confined to their bases, under frequent missile attack, while a new generation of Iraqis rises up to reclaim their country from the corrupt former exiles the U.S. flew in with its invasion forces 17 years ago.
Any responsible government Americans elect in 2020 must learn from the well-documented failure and catastrophic human cost of U.S. regime change efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Somalia, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran and now Bolivia.
These “lessons learned” should lead to U.S. withdrawal from the countries we have wrecked, opening the way for the UN and other legitimate mediators to come in and help their people to form sovereign, independent governments and to resolve the intractable secondary conflicts that U.S. wars and covert operations have unleashed.
Secondly, the U.S. must conduct global diplomatic outreach to make peace with our enemies, end our illegal sanctions and threats, and reassure the people of the world that they need no longer fear and arm themselves against the threat of U.S. aggression. The most potent signals that we have really turned over a new leaf would be serious cuts in the U.S. military budget — we currently outspend the next seven or eight militaries combined, despite our endless military failures; a reduction in U.S. conventional forces and weapons to the level needed to meet our country’s legitimate defense needs; and the closure of most of the hundreds of U.S. military bases on the territories of other nations, which amount to a global military occupation.
Maybe most vitally, the U.S. should reduce the threat of the most catastrophic of all wars, nuclear war, by finally complying with its obligations under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires the U.S. and other nuclear-armed countries to move towards “full and complete nuclear disarmament.”
In 2019, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists kept the hands of its Doomsday clock at two minutes to midnight, symbolizing that we are as close to self-destruction as we have ever been. Its 2019 statement cited the double danger of climate change and nuclear war:
“Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention.”
So it is a matter of survival for the U.S. to cooperate with the rest of the world to achieve major breakthroughs on both these fronts.
If this seems far-fetched or overly ambitious, that is a measure of how far we have strayed from the sanity, humanity and peaceful cooperation we will need to survive this century. A world in which war is normal and peace is out of reach is no more survivable or sustainable than a world where the atmosphere gets hotter every year. Permanently ending this entire U.S. policy of coercive regime change is therefore a political, moral and existential imperative.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 23:05 - De Beers Diamond Sales Sump Again In Rough Year
De Beers Diamond Sales Sump Again In Rough Year
De Beers, the world’s largest diamond miner, has been rocked this year with declining sales as the diamond crisis deepens in 2019 and set to worsen in 2020, reported Bloomberg.
The Anglo American Plc unit reported sales this year fell by $1.4 billion, ending a year that has been filled with concerns of oversupplied markets, plunging consumer demand, and price cutting.
De Beers sold $425 million of diamonds this month at its latest sale. That brought the total to about $4 billion for the year.
De Beers has spent the back half of the year slashing diamond prices as global markets remained oversupplied into the holiday season, mostly reflecting demand woes for top markets in the US, Europe, and China.
Macroeconomic headwinds have primarily been the reason for waning diamond demand as a global trade recession continues to throw the global economy into a desynchronized formation.
As a result of oversupplied markets for rough diamonds and falling prices for polished stones, De Beers will mine one million carats less than previously thought in both 2020 and 2021. That equates to about 1% of the global diamond output and outlines how the world’s largest miner is slowing its expansion amid uncertain times.
To address oversupplied conditions, De Beers has lowered prices of rough stones, which has cut into profits.
The diamond midstream, the link between African mines and jewelry stores in Hong Kong, London, and New York, has too much inventory as spot prices continue to sink, and banks are starting to pull back on lines of credit. Many traders have been left unprofitable in 2019.
De Beers, which sets the price of diamonds to traders, slashed prices by 5% last month in hopes to stimulate demand. The company has ramped up digital, print, and television advertisements to persuade consumers on why they need a diamond.
Glancing at a composite of spot diamond prices, the IDEX Diamond Index shows how oversupplied conditions have weighed down prices in the last 12 months.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 22:45 - Dystopian Toilet Adds Raging Quad Pain For Employees Taking 'Netflix And Poo' Breaks
Dystopian Toilet Adds Raging Quad Pain For Employees Taking 'Netflix And Poo' Breaks
For those who deal with the occasional stubborn poop, a new startup’s toilet design will add a new level of difficulty to that prize-fight; your quads will be on fire.
Designed by UK-based StandardToilet, the new ‘throne’, tilted at a 13-degree angle, supposedly provides a myriad of health benefits – while encouraging employees to abandon the occasional ‘Netflix and poo’ break do to the fact that it becomes uncomfortable to sit on after just five minutes of use.
BREAKING NEWS: Say goodbye to comfort breaks! New downward-tilting toilets are designed to become unbearable to sit on after five minutes. They say the main benefit is to employees in improved employee productivity. pic.twitter.com/lfDbeXJdCX
— Dave Vescio (@DaveVescio) December 17, 2019
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
The dystopian toilet, approved by the British Toilet Association (BTA), was inspired by “a series of annoyances,” according to StandardToilet founder Mahabir Gill – who says he discovered that over four decades as a consulting engineer, he became increasingly annoyed by long waits to use the toilet – discovering that some co-workers were sleeping on the pot, according to Wired.
“Its main benefit is to the employers, not the employees,” Gill told the outlet, adding “It saves the employer money.”
The fight to clampdown on toilet time has begun, it seems. After all, the alternative toilet market is booming. Japanese-style toilets are finally breaking into Western markets, and products like the Squatty Potty are offering us revolutionary new ways to sit on the toilet. Waterless compost toilets are catering to eco-conscious poopers, while others believe the future is rimless. But, is policing your pooing a step too far?
The StandardToilet was given public backing by BTA in November and retails between £150 and £500, and Gill is already in talks with several local councils and major motorway service stations to distribute his product, and believes their market extends to train stations, pubs, shopping malls and offices. –Wired
That said, according to the report a July survey realized that London workers spend nearly 30 minutes taking a shit.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 22:44 - Pro-Trump Activist Returns To Clean Baltimore Streets For Fourth Time
Pro-Trump Activist Returns To Clean Baltimore Streets For Fourth Time
Authored by Peter Svab via The Epoch Times,
Conservative activist Scott Presler has put together yet another group of volunteers to pick up trash from the streets of Baltimore.
It was the fourth time that Presler has embarked on the sanitation quest, sparked by President Donald Trump’s criticism of the city’s maintenance record.
“We’re officially the trash brigade,” Presler wrote in a Dec. 14 post on Twitter, posting a video from the cleanup that day.
“Whether rain, nor sleet, nor snow, we’re on a mission to bring love into urban areas across America.”
The city has struggled with trash on its streets for years, and its shrinking population has left more than 16,000 uninhabitable empty houses. Many of the homes are in an unsafe condition—the city owns many of them, but only comes once a year to clean up the alleys, Presler was previously told.
Some of the most squalid neighborhoods are in West Baltimore, where Presler focused his efforts.
Presler pulled off the first cleanup on Aug. 5, removing over 12 tons of trash with the help of some 200 volunteers.
He said in a prior interview with The Epoch Times that he was tired of people talking about what should be done and wanted to do something about the problem in Baltimore, “even if it’s just me on a street corner picking up trash.”
“Since August 2019, we’ve removed 29 tons of trash from the city of Baltimore. We made a promise to 81-year-old, 4-foot-10 Miss Louise that we would keep coming back,” states the web page Presler set up for volunteers to register for the last cleanup.
“In addition to picking up waste, we are asking volunteers to bring gifts that we can donate to Toys For Tots in Baltimore. The best way to show love is through actions, not words.”
Presler also helped organize similar cleanups in other cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, and Newark, New Jersey. Altogether, over 105 tons of trash have been removed from the streets as a part of these initiatives, he wrote in a Dec. 11 post on Twitter.
The largest cleanup was in a homeless camp in Los Angeles, where the volunteers picked up more than 50 tons of trash. They had to wear “hazmat suits,” he wrote in a Dec. 3 post on Twitter, because the city has “dangerous bacteria.”
“I want to make it very clear. This is not Baltimore, this is worse than Baltimore,” he said in a video attached to the post.
#ThePersistence
Presler, a dedicated Trump supporter, has a major presence on social media, with more than 300,000 followers on Twitter, where he posts prolifically under the nickname #ThePersistence.
In his latest initiative, he plans a voter registration drive for 2020, starting in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Jan. 11, and going through Florida, Virginia, Oregon, Texas, California, Tennessee, Washington, and Pennsylvania, before finishing in Massachusetts on Mar. 7.
“I started off as a dog walker. Then, spent 2 years of my life working to defeat Hillary Clinton. Now, I travel to America’s dirtiest cities to pick up trash & register voters,” he wrote in a Dec. 12 post on Twitter.
“I started in the dog house, pick up trash by the outhouse, & want Trump to stay in the White House.”
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 22:25 - Class 8 Market Continues Collapse As Navistar Cuts 1,300 More Jobs
Class 8 Market Continues Collapse As Navistar Cuts 1,300 More Jobs
Job cuts and bankruptcies in the world of heavy duty trucking have been a way of life over the last 18 months, as we have documented, with the industry steeped in recession as it reflects a larger, global slowdown in manufacturing.
That trend looks to be well in tact, with major transportation company Navistar reporting this week that it was going to be eliminating more than 1,300 jobs in North American production.
The company reported lower net income and revenue during Q4 as the industry’s falling demand for trucks continued. Net income also fell for the year. The maker of international trucks said it would lay off 10% of its workforce and slashed its forecast for 2020 revenue to below the lowest estimate among analysts, which sent its share down more than 10%.
It was the biggest drop for the company’s shares since October 2018.
Troy Clarke, Navistar chairman, president and CEO, said: “We are taking actions to adjust our business to current market conditions, including reducing production rates and selling, general and administrative expenses while restructuring our global and export operations. Building on the strong gains achieved over the last several years, Navistar has a clear roadmap in place for sustained growth that will set it apart from the industry.”
Profits in the company’s truck segment fell to $86 million in the fourth quarter, down from $197 million a year earlier. For the year, it posted net income of $221 million, down 58% from the $340 million it posted last year.
Recall, we noted at the beginning of the month that November’s Class 8 order numbers across the industry were collapsing.
November culminated a dismal year that some thought had seen a reprive with October’s improved bookings. But data from FreightWaves showed that the collapse had continued its trend, indicating that the sluggish economy is to blame for lackluster replacement demand.
Orders totaled 17,300 units for November, which marked the slowest November since 2015 and a 39% collapse from November 2018. The slowdown in orders is also prompting layoffs by companies like Daimler Trucks North America, Volvo Trucks North America and Paccar Inc.
Other names in the Class 8 supply chain are also dealing with these negative trends. For instance, engine manufacturer Cummins Inc. is “laying off 2,000 white-collar employees globally in the first quarter of 2020”.
Meanwhile, November used to be a month when fleets would be busy placing orders for the upcoming year. After October’s slight tick up in orders, many analysts thought November could follow suit. That didn’t happen, and sequentially November’s order book was down 21% from October.
Don Ake, FTR vice president of commercial vehicles commented: “The stalling of freight growth is causing fleets to exercise caution in placing orders for 2020. There will still be plenty of freight to haul, so we expect fleets will continue to be profitable and to replace older equipment. However, there won’t be a need for much additional equipment on the roads.”
“The industry thrives on stability, but we are now on a rocky road,” Ake concluded.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 22:05 - 'Global Mega Trends To 2030' Forecasts Matrix-Like Automated Future
'Global Mega Trends To 2030' Forecasts Matrix-Like Automated Future
Authored by Daniel Taylor via OldThinkerNews.com,
Global Mega Trends to 2030, a recent report from the business consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, paints a picture of an automated transhuman world.
The top trend is transhumanism, which will drive “technology-driven evolution at an unprecedented speed of change, propelling deeper questions into what it is to be human”.
Other trends identified in the report include an overall move to automation, virtual reality leading to a matrix-like “total reality-virtuality continuum“, a rollout of 6G, and “ubiquitous connectivity anytime and anywhere by 2030”.
Here is a summary of the report:
1. Transhumanism: Humanity is entering the rise of technology-driven evolution at an unprecedented speed of change, propelling deeper questions into what it is to be human.
2. Autonomous World: Autonomous applications could extend beyond warehouses to outside logistics with the industrial, aerospace, smart home infrastructure, and automotive industries becoming fully automated and intelligent.
3. Connected Living: Seamless integration of video, voice, and data services will provide access and ubiquitous connectivity anytime and anywhere by 2030.
4. Industry 5.0: With collaborative human-machine interaction, Industry 4.0 will begin to move towards Industry 5.0 in an iconic transition towards mass customization and extreme personalization.
5. Digital Reality as Frontier Technology: Augmented and virtual reality technology will begin evolving towards a total reality-virtuality continuum.
6. Complex Needs of a Heterogenous Society: A heterogeneous society will transform business models across a diverse set of industries.
7. Data as 21st Century Oil: Data will become as important as oil, reaching into previously unserved customer segments that help in opening up new revenue streams.
8. Era of Intelligent Digital Assistants: Intelligent assistants will optimize and personalize daily experiences across all activities and environments.
9. ‘Uberization’ of Industries: Peer-to-peer (P2P) services are expected to transform and penetrate several non-traditional applications.
10. Concept of ‘Zero’ World: A Mega Vision of a Zero concept world, which will urge companies to shift focus and develop products and technologies that innovate to zero.
11. Rise of Platform Economy: Digital leaders will consolidate efforts to build a diverse ecosystem, comprising of infrastructure on which platforms are built.
12. Zero Latency World: A world with no latency will emerge from ongoing advancements in 5G and the introduction of 6G by 2030, wherein millions of connected devices will interact in real-time at microsecond latency.
A pro-human renaissance could disrupt these trends and provide humanity with a chance to break free from technocratic tyranny.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 21:45 - Wall Street Analyst Jobs Vanish As Banks Take An Axe To Research With Market At Record Highs
Wall Street Analyst Jobs Vanish As Banks Take An Axe To Research With Market At Record Highs
Is the death of Wall Street equity research finally at hand? Because who needs an expensive team of analysts when clients can easily reap double-digit returns by dumping their money into passive funds?
The fact that sell-side research departments have been shedding analysts this year is hardly a surprise. MiFID II regulations made it clear from the beginning that banks would soon lose a valuable revenue stream used to support research by forcing the sell side to “unbundle” research & trading costs.
A study by McKinsey published in 2017 anticipated that the headcount at Wall Street research departments would shrink by 30% in the coming years because of MiFID.
But as Bloomberg reminds us, 2019 was the year that the heads really started to roll. Across Wall Street, equity analysts were told to clean out their desks. Even fresh all-time market highs weren’t enough to save them.
Data shared by consultant Coalition with several financial media organizations, including Bloomberg, claimed that the total head count of sell-side equity analysts fell to roughly 3,500 this year, its lowest level in decades.
The relentless decline of brokerage research is accelerating. Its ranks shrank 8% to 3,500 across 12 major banks, data showed earlier this year, on pace for the sharpest annual decrease since research firm Coalition Development started collating the numbers in 2012.
One veteran Citigroup analyst who spoke with Bloomberg for its story said he left his job after 18 years and now works for a non-profit. Many other analysts have made similar career moves this year.
A Citigroup Inc. analyst for almost 18 years, Andrew Howell knows very well what to expect when you’re pitching a service that fewer and fewer customers need or want. So he found another line of work.
Howell now toils in a co-working space in Manhattan’s East Village doing research for a non-profit organization, part of the legion of Wall Street analysts reinventing themselves as demand for their skills fades.
MiFID isn’t the only factor impacting Wall Street analysts. Their field lies at the intersection of several trends reshaping the financial services industry, including the advent of automation and AI.
But for now, while these tools have changed things, they haven’t totally supplanted human analysts, or obviated the need for real human scrutiny.
According to BBG’s data, large American asset managers are currently leading the trend of unbundling their trading business and research.
The rules that have led banks to cut down their research staff were supposed to help the buy side by reducing the cost of research. But interestingly enough, a consulting firm teamed up with Evercore to study how research spending impacts asset-management firms’ performance.
They found that firms who skimped on the research spend routinely underperformed those that spent more.
It’s not all doom and gloom. Some banks are taking advantage of the retrenchment. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. hired new analysts this year to “get a bigger piece of what is overall a smaller pie,” said Jim Covello, Goldman’s global co-head of single-stock research.
Dwindling sell-side research may finally settle the question of its value. U.S. managers spend between three to six times more on research than their European peers, Neil Scarth at Frost Consulting estimates. An analysis by Evercore ISI and Frost argued that firms paying for analysis out of their own pockets generally underperformed last year, suggesting they’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish.
But the biggest boon for firms looking to take advantage of this trend will probably be found among boutique firms. As banks are forced to cut back there coverage, inevitably, even more will slip through the cracks.
This should create opportunities for smaller activist firms like this one willing to think creatively and invest more in research.
On the other hand, companies who know they are facing less scrutiny from Wall Street and the media might be emboldened to try and cover up or bury information that might hurt their stock.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 21:25 - Protest Pandimonium: A Look At The Most-Ridiculous Campus Demonstrations Of 2019
Protest Pandimonium: A Look At The Most-Ridiculous Campus Demonstrations Of 2019
Authored by Addison Smith via CampusReform.org,
This year, conservative students had their beliefs silenced and beaten down by their leftist classmates and professors. A survey discovered that nearly half of college students have personally experienced their own professors verbally protest President Donald Trump in class.
Campus Reform has put together some of the wildest instances of protests on college campuses.
1. Students call on university to ban ICE contractor from campus
After increasing demand to “abolish ICE” from leftists around the country, students at Carnegie Mellon University took it upon themselves to insist that the tech company Palantir be banned from doing business with the school because of its contract with ICE.
This #NoTechForICE demonstration included a petition signed by more than 300 people demanding that Palantir discontinue business relations with ICE, and demanding that the school do the same with Palantir.
2. EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Leftist students call Charlie Kirk, conservatives ‘racist,’ can’t give any evidence
Hundreds of students at North Carolina State University gathered inside the university’s Talley Student Union to protest Charlie Kirk and Lara Trump’s speech on campus. Allegations of “racism” and “fascism” overflowed from the students, but they were not able to pinpoint any instances of either.
After one student was asked for evidence of claims that Kirk, Trump, and Turning Point USA embodied these allegations, she told Campus Reform Correspondent Addison Smith to “go fuck yourself.” When another student bluntly exclaimed, “Fuck Charlie Kirk,” he provided reasons for saying so such as “I don’t know. Seems like a dick” and “I just don’t vibe with the guy.”
WATCH:
3. Students hold ‘die-in’ to protest fossil fuels — ‘stuff that literally kills people’
A group known as DIVEST BING at Binghamton University held a “die-in” protest by playing dead and laying gravestones out on campus. This came in light of the school’s investment in “stuff that literally kills people” – fossil fuels.
Photo credit: Pipe Dream
Students suggested that the school was “adamant on keeping as much of this as quiet as possible,” even though Executive Director of the BU Foundation Sheila Doyle said that she met with the group and explained the situation, adding that the financial statements are online for the public to see.
4. Berkeley FEMALE profs wear BEARDS to protest alleged gender bias
Female paleontologists at the University of California-Berkeley decided to wear fake beards to shed light on”‘gender bias” in their field.
The Bearded Lady Project aimed to promote the idea that women can contribute to science just as much as men can. To prove this, they were “challenging the face of science,” “one beard at a time.” Photos of these women wearing artificial facial hair were on display at the college.
“We came in expecting there would be some degree of discrimination, and that we would have to adapt to a male-dominated academic setting,” paleontologist Patricia Holroyd said.
5. VIDEO: Harvard vs. Yale game DELAYED after climate protesters storm field
During a football game between Harvard and Yale, a play was suspended as dozens of climate activists rushed onto the field to object to both schools allegedly being “complicit in climate injustice.”
This stunt delayed the game for almost 40 minutes. Protesters were asked numerous times beforehand to clear the field, but the number grew increasingly larger throughout its duration.
WATCH:
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 21:05 - Brazil's Oprah-Endorsed 'Psychic Surgeon' Rapist Gets 19 Years In Prison
Brazil's Oprah-Endorsed 'Psychic Surgeon' Rapist Gets 19 Years In Prison
A Brazilian faith healer known as João de Deus, or John of God (real name Joao Teixeira de Faria), was sentenced to 19 years and four months in his first prison sentence stemming from a spate of sex abuse allegations uncovered by a journalist whose son says she was murdered.
Joao Teixeira de Faria a.k.a. “John of God” According to ABC News, the 77-year-old de Faria was convicted of raping four women, reads a statement from the court. His lawyers say he will appeal the decision, while he faces additional cases related to 10 more alleged sex crimes. He has also been accused, though not charged, of running sex-slave farms for child trafficking, allegedly killing mothers after 10 years of birthing.
Faria, whose high-profile clients were rumored to include supermodel Naomi Campbell, former President Bill Clinton and singer Paul Simon, rose to international fame after Oprah Winfrey sat down with him in a 2010 interview – calling him “inspiring.”
Since then, hundreds of women – including his daughter – have accused him of all types of sexual abuse ranging from groping to rape.
As we noted in February, de Faria started his “spiritual hospital” in 1978, the Casa de Dom Inácio de Loyola – named after Saint Ignatius, one of the 37 spirits Faria claimed would inhibit his body during psychic healing sessions, according to The Sun. In 1979, a benefactor secured land for him in a small town of Abadiânia, Brazil, where he received over 10,000 visitors a month.
John of God’s “spiritual surgeries” would often involve scraping people’s eyeballs without anesthetics, or inserting scissors of forceps inside people’s noses to cure various conditions. His accusers say he took it much further – instructing them to face away from them before performing sexual acts to “cure” them, allegations Faria denies.
Last December, four women appeared on Brazilian television to accuse Faria of molesting them during sessions, including Dutch choreographer Zahira Lienke Mous, who says she learned of Faria from Oprah Winfrey’s interview.
Speaking on TV Globo, three of the women described their encounters with Faria to host Pedro Bial on condition of anonymity. Dutch choreographer Zahira Lieneke Mous decided to be named, and said that during one of her trips to see the healer to be cured of the trauma of previous sexual assault, he took her into a back room and had her masturbate him. He then had her pick out a gemstone from a set and granted special treatment. She has also accused him of raping her during another session.
…
São Paolo businesswoman Aline Salih told local newspaper Folha de São Paulo in an article that published on Monday that a similar incident had happened to her. –BuzzFeed News
Following the broadcast, Brazilian prosecutors announced that more than 200 women had come forward with similar claims, leading for prosecutors for the state of Goias to call for his arrest.
The rapist faith-healer withdrew 35 million reais ($8.9m US) from various bank accounts, causing authorities to respond with an arrest warrant over concerns he would flee the country or hide money from those who might sue. De Faria surrendered himself to police in Abadiania, and was transported to police headquarters in Goiania, the capital of the state of Goias.
De Faria’s daughter, Dalva Tiexeira, says that her father abused and raped her between the ages of 10 and 14, and that he only stopped after she became pregnant by one of his employees. The subsequent beating she received from “John of God” caused her to miscarry, she says.
Dalva Teixeira, de Faria’s daughter “My father is a monster,” stated Teixeira.
Suspicious suicide
Another highly disturbing aspect of the case is that of 38-yeaer-old Brazilian activist, Sabrina Bittencourt, who mysteriously “committed suicide” in Lebanon in February while she was on the road and “living under protection.”
Sabrina Bittencourt As we noted at the time:
Bittencourt said she had received reports of Faria’s sex slave operation in which newborns were sold for up to £40,000 ($51,000 USD) in the United States, Europe and Australia.
She claimed Faria would offer money to poor girls aged 14 to 18 to go and live in mineral mines or farms he owns in the Brazilian states of Goias and Minas Gerais.
There they would become sex slaves and be forced to get pregnant, then their babies would be sold to the highest bidder.
“In exchange for food, they were impregnated and their babies sold on the black market,” she said.
“Hundreds of girls were enslaved over years, living on farms in Goias, and served as wombs to get pregnant, for their babies to be sold.
“These girls were murdered after 10 years of giving birth. We have got a number of testimonies.” –The Sun
Bittencourt’s eldest son, Gabriel Baum, confirmed her death on Facebook with a note that read: “She took the last step so that we could live. They killed my mother.“
“We said goodbye in Paris, she traveled to Barcelona for a few days to create the protection network for Brazilians of exile and returned to Lebanon with her girlfriend. It was one of the countries she loved!” Gabriel posted to Facebook.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 20:45 - There Are More Than 300 US Military Bases With Possible "Toxic Forever" Chemical Contamination
There Are More Than 300 US Military Bases With Possible "Toxic Forever" Chemical Contamination
Authored by Meghann Myers via MilitaryTimes.com,
Hundreds of military installations have either known or likely water contamination caused by runoff from firefighting foam used in response to vehicle and aircraft accidents, according to the Environmental Working Group.
Using Defense Department data, the organization built an interactive map of 305 sites, which are found in all 50 states. Each map dot opens up to information and links on perfluorooctane sulfonate or perfluorooctanoic acid, known as PFAS.
“Of these sites, 138 have not been previously identified on EWG’s map of known PFAS contamination at military bases, civilian airports and industrial sites,” according to a Tuesday new release.
“In addition, 42 of these sites were not included on a list of 401 locations the Pentagon gave to Congress of active and former installations where PFAS contamination was known or suspected.”
The map went live the day after the House and Senate armed services committees finalized a compromise defense authorization bill for 2020, which includes provisions to approaching the PFAS issue going forward.
Expected to see a vote in the House on Wednesday, the law would prohibit the use of PFAS-laden firefighting foam after Oct. 1, 2024, and immediately ban any use of the foam outside of emergency situations.
While the bill dropped a provision that would have brought PFAS-contaminated bases under the federal Superfund law, providing funding and a requirement to clean them up, the NDAA pushes the Pentagon to work with state governments to start clean up using funds from the Defense Environmental Remediation Account.
It would also require that military firefighters are testing for PFAS levels in their blood, as the chemicals do not break down over time and are known to build up in the human body.
In the mean time, the Air Force has been testing a system that might be able to remove PFAS from ground water, and DoD is funding research into a new firefighting foam.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 20:25 - Paul Volcker: The Man Who Vanquished Gold
Paul Volcker: The Man Who Vanquished Gold
Authored by Joseph Salerno via The Mises Institute,
The flood of obituaries that noted the passing of Paul Volcker (1927-2019) last week have almost all lauded his achievement as Fed chair (1979-1987) in reining in the double-digit inflation that ravaged the U.S. economy during the 1970s.
Volcker was referred to as the “former Fed chairman who fought inflation” (here); “inflation tamer” and “a full-fledged inflation warrior” (here); and the “Fed chairman who waged war on inflation” and led “the Federal Reserve’s brute-force campaign to subdue inflation” (here). Mr. Volcker certainly deserves credit for curbing the Great Inflation of the 1970s. However, he also merits a lion’s share of the blame for unleashing the Great Inflation on the U.S. and the world economy in the first place.
For it was Mr. Volcker who masterminded the program that President Nixon announced on August 15, 1971, which unilaterally suspended gold convertibility of U.S. dollars held by foreign governments and central banks, imposed a fascist wage-price freeze on the U.S. economy, and slapped a 10 percent surcharge on foreign imports.
Tragically, by severing the last link between the dollar and gold, Volcker’s program scuttled the last chance of restoring a genuine gold standard.
More than two years before Nixon slammed down the “gold window,” Volcker, the recently appointed undersecretary of the treasury for monetary affairs, gave an oral presentation to Nixon and his closest advisors on US balance-of-payments problems. The presentation was based on a memo that the secret “Volcker group,” initiated by Henry Kissinger, spent five months preparing.
Among other things, Volcker recommended a continuation of capital controls to prop up the inflated dollar’s overvalued exchange rate and a massive appreciation or “revaluation” of the currencies of less inflationary countries such as West Germany, placing the burden of adjustment to unrestrained US inflation on these countries. Volcker then planted the time bomb that would eventually detonate and seal the fate of the gold standard. He suggested to Nixon that if these measures did not work to sustain the pseudo–gold standard of the Bretton Woods System, a run on the US gold stock could only be avoided by unilaterally repudiating the postwar US pledge to convert foreign official dollar holdings into gold. Unfortunately, the Volcker Group report summarily dismissed the alternative of raising — possibly doubling — the dollar price of gold, i.e., “devaluing the dollar,” which would have increased the value of the US gold stock and facilitated the restoration of a genuine gold standard.
Only a real gold standard could have halted and reversed the slow-motion collapse that the international monetary system had been undergoing since the mid-1960s due to large and persistent US payments deficits driven by profligate dollar creation.
Volcker, however, hated and wanted to get rid of the last vestiges of the gold standard and replace it with a fixed exchange-rate system dominated by the US fiat dollar to further enhance the power and prestige of the U.S. in international affairs.
According to Volcker, “the stability and strength of our currency was important to sustaining the broad role of the United States in the world.”
Years later, Volcker revealed, “I have never been able to shake the feeling that a strong currency is generally a good thing, and that it is typically a sign of vigor and strength and competitiveness.”
One of his biographers intimated that Volcker’s longstanding regret at having been rejected for military service during World War II because of his height was at the root of his single-minded determination to maintain “the supremacy of the American dollar as the world’s premier currency.”
Indeed, Volcker struggled mightily to make the dollar appear strong, even while rampant money printing to finance Great Society welfare programs and the Vietnam War inexorably weakened it. But Volcker bitterly opposed raising the price of gold, because he feared that open devaluation of the inflated dollar would not only diminish the status and reputation of the US, but also reward people and countries he detested, namely, speculators in gold and gold-producing countries such as the Soviet Union and South Africa. He especially loathed and wanted to punish President Charles de Gaulle and the French for embarrassing and discrediting the US by withdrawing from NATO and exposing the weakness of the dollar by insisting on converting their dollars into gold in the face of US threats to remove military protection against the Soviet Union. (To add insult to injury, de Gaulle had sent naval ships to retrieve French gold.)
When a full-blown run on U.S. gold stock appeared imminent in early 1971, Volcker prepared a memorandum for the new treasury secretary, former Texas governor and master political operative John Connally. The memo contained three main proposals. First, countries with less inflationary monetary policies, and therefore balance-of-payments surpluses, such as West Germany and Japan, would be imposed upon to substantially appreciate the value of their currencies, thereby encouraging US exports and stifling its imports while sparing the it the embarrassment of openly devaluing the dollar. Second, Volcker recommended a preemptive strike against gold in the form of a “cold-blooded suspension” of gold convertibility. Volcker’s final proposal was a temporary wage-price freeze.
As one of Volcker’s biographers characterized his motivation, “[H]e wanted America to act preemptively, to avoid appearance of defeat at the hands of currency speculators.” (Emphasis added.)
Secretary Connally bought into Volcker’s program. When a severe dollar crisis struck a few months later, he used all his substantial political wiles to persuade Nixon of the merits of the Volcker plan. Then Fed Chairman and Nixon advisor Arthur Burns, for all his erroneous monetary ideas and policy failures, was convinced that gold should play — at least nominally — a central role in the international monetary system. In fact, “[a]fter Nixon took office, Burns proposed to end the balance-of-payments problem by increasing the official price of gold,” which would have “effectively devalue[d] the dollar.”
In Burns’s view, this would maintain gold as the anchor of a fixed exchange-rate system, an outcome that Volcker would have detested. Not surprisingly, Burns was “troubled” by Volcker, who he thought had given “a stupid reply” to Nixon about raising the price of gold. Burns also recognized and bemoaned Volcker’s influence over Connally: “Somehow, poor and wretched Volcker — never knowing where he stood on any issue — had succeeded in instilling an irrational fear of gold in his tyrannical master whom he tried constantly to please by catering to his hatred of foreigners (particularly the French).”
Unfortunately, Burns had badly underestimated Volcker, and had mistaken his tact and strategic compromising for vacillation and indecisiveness. As his biographer noted, Volcker
admired John Connally’s social skills and had learned much from the master politician. … He preferred to equivocate, qualify, and risk being branded a poor communicator, rather than feign certainty.
In the end, the wily Connally-Volcker axis prevailed over the politically naïve Burns. Burns’s biographer clearly recognized Volcker’s political cunning in winning over Nixon:
The President decided against Burns. Paul Volcker convinced him that suspension [of gold convertibility] was inevitable and that delay would only create financial chaos. Perhaps more important, Nixon realized if he announced the move as part of a new economic package, he would appear to be acting decisively to take charge of the crisis, making, as Volcker put it, “the devaluation of the dollar into a political triumph, which was no mean feat.”
Thus it was that Volcker’s memo was used as the basis of the New Economic Policy that was hammered out by Nixon and his advisors, including Volcker, at Camp David and announced in Nixon’s fateful Sunday address to the nation.
One obituarist listed Volcker’s “great public accomplishments” thusly:
He was the point man at the Treasury Department in 1971 who managed the dollar’s untethering from gold; he quelled the double-digit inflation that took root in the U.S. in the late 1970s; he helped guide the country’s response to the 2008 financial crisis.
Unfortunately, this list grossly overstates Volcker’s public accomplishments, because it does not reveal the causal connection between his vanquishing the last remnants of the gold standard and the ensuing inflation of the fiat dollar whose supply was then subject solely to the decisions of bureaucrats eagerly seeking to please their political masters.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 19:45 - Former NSA Director Rogers "Very Cooperative" With Durham Russia Probe
Former NSA Director Rogers "Very Cooperative" With Durham Russia Probe
The man who some consider the first ‘whistleblower’, after taking what Joe DiGenova called “immense risks” briefing the Trump team on the Obama’s administration’s surveillance, has been cooperating with the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the counterintelligence investigation of the Trump presidential campaign’s alleged ties to Russia, according to four people familiar with Rogers’s participation.
The Intercept’s Matthew Cole reports that retired Admiral Michael Rogers, the former Director of the National Security Agency, has met with John Durham on multiple occasions, according to two people familiar with Rogers’s cooperation. While the substance of those meetings is not clear, Rogers has cooperated voluntarily, several people with knowledge of the matter said.
While Durham has reportedly recently sought former CIA Director John Brennan’s emails, call logs, and other documents from the C.I.A., Cole notes that Rogers’s voluntary participation, which has not been previously reported, makes him the first former intelligence director known to have been interviewed for the probe.
“He’s been very cooperative,” one former intelligence officer who has knowledge of Rogers’s meetings with the Justice Department said.
In addition to Brennan, and now Rogers, Politico and NBC News have previously reported that Durham intends to interview former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
As Cole concludes, the Mueller probe, the recent inspector general’s report, and now the Durham investigation have done little to bridge the yawning political divide between Trump (and his supporters), who continue to see him as the victim of a politically motivated “witch hunt,” and career intelligence and national security officials, who view the Durham investigation as an effort to punish those who led U.S. efforts to investigate Russia’s election meddling. In May, Trump gave Barr the unprecedented authority to review and declassify intelligence related to the Russia investigation, further inflaming national security veterans.
Durham’s investigation has also sought information from foreign governments.
Although AG Barr said there is likely many months before Durham’s report is complete, it would appear, by the leaks of his contacts, that the federal prosecutor is narrowing in his scope on those who were really responsible for all the “mistakes” that were made.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 19:25 - Reason Is The Greatest Weapon In The Fight Against Tyranny
Reason Is The Greatest Weapon In The Fight Against Tyranny
Authored by Daisy Luther via The Organic Prepper,
The importance of logic and accurate information in stressful times cannot be overstated.
With the gun control mess occurring in Virginia right now, there have been a lot of rumors, a lot of interpretations, and a lot of allegations from anonymous sources.
I haven’t written this to call anyone out. I’m certain that the people covering this story have honorable intentions. I’ve written this because I want to remind everyone that reason is our greatest weapon in the battle against tyranny.
What we know vs. what some guy said
I cannot confirm whether any of these current rumors circulating right now are true or not. Neither can I predict if they’ll come to pass. I try to provide balanced information based on provable sources.
Sometimes readers get angry about this and accuse me of passing on “misinformation.” It’s unfortunate they feel that it is misinformation, but I only publish what I have a source to corroborate. I might speculate but then I make sure that I’ve pointed out my thoughts are mere speculation and that there’s no evidence of this.
At times like this, more than ever, we have to work in the realm of what we know versus what the gossip is. What we know is the wording of the bills on the table, the statements from elected officials, and the statements from the National Guard.
This doesn’t mean to completely rule out the rumors. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that communications could be taken down in a “rebel” area. It’s important to plan for all the possibilities. But I don’t think me running a story full of suppositions and anonymous sources is actually helpful at all. I don’t want to fan the flames of an already volatile situation with things that I cannot prove.
It’s irresponsible. I won’t do it.
My goal is to help you get prepared for the things which are most likely. To do that, I have to focus on what we know.
Logic, not hysteria, will win the day.
Like the rest of you, I’m good and mad about this. However, I’m trying to go about this from a place of reason. I’m trying to go about my reporting using old-school journalism – remember back in the days when we were supposed to be unbiased?
Cooler heads are needed in situations such as these. Practical information and advice are necessary.
If you get hysterical and get all worked up about the boundless possibilities of a tyrannical state, you’re not thinking logically and that will get you nowhere good. Humans can only function at a high level of adrenaline for a certain amount of time. You’re going to crash if you keep yourself completely worked up all the time.
I’m not suggesting you underestimate the possibilities. Let me be perfectly clear when I tell you that I would not rule anything out. This is a move that has been strategically planned, as I wrote before. We must be strategic in our responses. Get organized with your family, friends, and neighbors and make sure that lacking another, yours is the voice of reason.
Work with what you know, first.
Work with the things you know, first. Then move on to other scenarios.
I urge you to sit down and make reasonable plans. Obviously you want to cover possibilities like loss of comms or loss of power, but you don’t need to go out and spend thousands of dollars on generators for this.
If you’re buying anything, focus on alternative communications that cannot be taken down as easily as cellphone towers and phone lines. Alternate communications devices much better options than going out and blowing the bank account on a generator that would only be valuable for a week or two, depending on how much fuel you can store. We bloggers all need to make a living and cover our costs, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with an affiliate link here and there. But be wary of any breathless story that urges you to spend thousands of dollars based on hearsay.
Think about the things that are most likely, and plan for those first. If you’ve been prepping for a while you’ll probably find you are ready for a lot of it but that you may need to fill some holes.
If you lost power, isn’t this one of the major reasons you prep? Sure, it would be inconvenient and even unpleasant, but ask anyone from California if it’s absolutely the end of the world. Check your preps and make sure you have what you need on hand. (If you feel unprepared for a lengthy power outage, this PDF guide can help and I marked it down to $5.)
Communication is likely to be one of those holes. Satellite phones are painfully expensive, but CB radios, ham radio, and even walkie talkies for nearby neighbors are all affordable investments that could be used in a variety of circumstances, not just this one.
Remember, we are resilient enough that a few days of inconveniences will not take us down.
You have the power here.
Should a worst-case-scenario occur, it’s only as powerful as you allow it to be.
Let’s imagine, for example, the rumor about the Governor wiping out power and comms is true. If you move flawlessly over to your backup plan, the state government has made themselves seem like tyrants in front of the country and the world and you are minimally affected.
Qualify your responses first based on what you know, then based on the possibilities. But understand that the possibilities are as of yet unknown. You can predict what will happen in a pandemic far more easily than you can predict what will happen in a fight against tyranny.
Regardless of the situation, reacting calmly and methodically is always going to be better than losing your ever-lovin’ mind and rushing around in a panic. Panic kills, whether the situation is slow-moving like this one or fast-moving, like an immediate life-and-death scenario.
This is a prime example of prepping versus survival. You have time – this law will not go through (if it does pass) until January. Meanwhile, don’t spend the next month in a blind frenzy based on what you see on websites or forums. Take it all into consideration but for cryin’ out loud, keep your s**t together.
Did you ever think these scare tactics might be leaked deliberately?
Has it crossed your mind that rooting these seeds of fear might be deliberate? Of course, an enemy would want to see you discombobulated – this is classic Art of War stuff. If you feel under attack already, you’re going to have worn yourself out by the time things have actually come to fruition.
By no means am I suggesting that you do not take the treasonous threats against the Second Amendment seriously. I’m not suggesting you overlook the potential ramifications of the anti-paramilitary bill and its vague wording. It would be bad for militias but in its current incarnation, I don’t think it’s as far-reaching as banning instruction on the use of guns or self-defense. This isn’t to say that it couldn’t be one day used for that, but at this point, I think the purpose of that bill is to strike down opposition to the gun bill.
Think about it: If you were in a position of power and you wanted to have your “enemy” scrambling, wouldn’t a deliberate “leak” of an extreme scenario be a good tool for this purpose?
Again, this isn’t to say it couldn’t happen or won’t happen. I’m saying, think it through entirely. What is practical and likely? What is so extreme it would cause censure from the rest of the nation?
The government absolutely did a lot of bad stuff in Waco and Ruby Ridge, but that was small-scale, comparatively. We’re talking about nearly an entire state here. That would be an encroachment on such a massive scale that there’d be an outcry. The President could – and probably would – take over the National Guard in a situation like this.
I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with a narcissist, but they glory in getting a response from people. They feed off it. If they aren’t getting the response they need, they will strive to unsettle and scare their victims until they do.
Don’t let people get in your head. Reason is the enemy of tyranny. A panicking person cannot strategize effectively. The decision-making part of your brain literally shuts down when you panic.
Be calm and methodical.
This stuff is huge and it could be the start of a dark era for our country. This has the potential to change everything our Republic has stood for since it existed.
But fear and hysteria have no place in your preparations. Please consider your sources and don’t base your actions on “maybes” and “this guy said” scenarios. Preparing for the possibilities in a calm and methodical way will help you through whatever may come far more than preparing in a state of panic.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 19:05 - Can Goldman's Former Top Mortgage Bond Salesman Revive Connecticut's Moribund Economy?
Can Goldman's Former Top Mortgage Bond Salesman Revive Connecticut's Moribund Economy?
Nutmeggers unleashed a collective groan last November when longtime telecommunications executive Ned Lamont defeated his Republican challenger to secure another four years of Democratic rule in Hartford.
His predecessor, Gov. Dannel Malloy, may have helped replenish the state’s rainy-day fund and improve some other aspects of the state’s finances, but he presided over a period where several major corporations moved their headquarters out of the state (including GE, which left Fairfield County for Boston, and Aetna, which nearly left Hartford before CVS decided otherwise at the last minute).
Over the past decade, economic growth in Connecticut has been stagnant, ranking among the worst-performing states (only Alaska and Wyoming were worse). The state’s population has shrunk by roughly 22,000 since 2014 as young educated workers left for more trendy urban enclaves like New York City and Boston, which also featured stronger employment prospects.
Now, Lamont is trying to apply his ‘business background’ to try and fix the state’s biggest problems – i.e. the fact that it’s not a very attractive destination for businesses. In the past, the state has relied on promises of preferential tax treatment in exchange for promises to create X number of high-paying jobs. Often, companies’ fell short, but were never made to pay the state back.
So, Lamont is trying a new tack: He’s surrounding himself with prominent figures from corporate America, including former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi, who is leading the state’s effort to recruit more businesses.
Among those recruited by Lamont is David Lehman, a former Goldman Sachs partner who played an interesting role in the run-up to the financial crisis. As the head of Goldman’s mortgage finance group, he instructed his people to clear all of the toxic CDOs off the bank’s books just before the bottom fell out of the market.
Lamont recently appointed Lehman to lead Connecticut’s Department of Economic and Community Development, and also named him a senior economic advisor.
Though we doubt the character was based on him, there are definitely some eerie similarities between Lehman’s crisis-era exploits at Goldman and the story arch of Kevin Spacey’s character in “Margin Call.”
After the crisis, Lehman was dragged in front of a Congressional committee to try and explain his involvement in the sale of one specific tranche of CDOs called “Timberwolf.”
The issue became notorious after one former Goldman executive described it as “a shitty deal” in an email uncovered by Congressional investigators. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation’s 2011 report on the financial crisis found that Lehman instructed his people not to give clients any written insights into how Goldman was valuing its securities.
Though he was never accused of wrongdoing, Lehman was grilled at a committee hearing back in 2011, and lawmakers in Connecticut raised the issue again during his confirmation hearing in Hartford.
To this day, Lehman insists that he didn’t know the product was worthless when he sold it to the bank’s clients.
“Any suggestion that I knew a product was going to be worthless and subsequently sold it to a client is completely and wholly untrue,” he said at the hearing. Reducing Goldman’s exposure to subprime mortgages was prudent risk management, he said. And, he said in an interview, that Goldman provided as much information as it had on prices in a volatile market.
“I’ve always conducted myself honestly and transparently and acted in good faith with all my dealings at Goldman Sachs,” Lehman said.
He was confirmed by a vote of 28 to 8.
However, nearly everything we have learned about Goldman’s corporate culture in the years since the crisis would suggest otherwise.
Still, Lamont and his friends in Hartford insist Lehman is “the perfect guy” to look after the interests of the people of Connecticut.
Lehman, known at Goldman as a convener and connector, is the “perfect guy” to bring Democrats and Republicans, business and labor together and sell the governor’s vision, said Susie Scher, global head of Goldman Sachs Financing Group.
“He’s a guy who can sit in the middle of disparate folks with differing objectives and bring them together because they all like and respect him,” she said.
Lehman’s approach to economic development centers around attracting more young people and businesses to Connecticut’s main urban centers: Hartford, New Haven, Bridgeport and Stamford.
And, as it so happens, his strategy for pulling this off relies heavily on the “Opportunity Zones” initiative that was included in the Republican tax plan (and which liberals have criticized as a hand-out to wealthy developers wrapped in the guise of helping the poor).
Twenty nine of the state’s 72 opportunity zones are in its four largest cities (mentioned above).
Lehman has lived in Greenwich for a decade, and thus believes he understands the state’s problems and how to fix them.
But one economist quoted by Bloomberg criticized Lehman’s tax-incentive plan as “pretty myopic,” arguing that companies prefer to receive tax breaks before they create jobs, and that instead of accepting the state’s deal, can easily just relocate somewhere more favorable.
The bottom line is this: As most Connecticut residents probably understand, all of Lehman’s (and the state’s) efforts will likely be worthless if they fail to accomplish one critical goal: Improve travel time to NYC on MetroNorth.
Lamont has supposedly made this a priority, and has set a lofty goal of cutting travel time to Manhattan in half. But if Connecticut wants to burnish the reputations of its cities as practical places for young people and companies to live and work, it will need to drastically improve commute times to Boston and New York.
If Lehman can’t offer companies access to more of the New York metropolitan area’s vibrant workforce, then companies won’t have a reason to come to Connecticut, no matter how many handouts you offer.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 18:45 - Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal
Why Western Media Ignore OPCW Scandal
Via The Strategic Culture Foundation,
The credibility of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons is on the line after a series of devastating leaks from whistleblowers has shown that the UN body distorted an alleged CW incident in Syria in 2018. The distortion by the OPCW of the incident suggests that senior directors at the organization were pressured into doing so by Western governments.
This has grave implications because the United States, Britain and France launched over 100 air strikes against Syria following the CW incident near Damascus in April 2018. The Western powers rushed to blame the Syrian government forces, alleging the use of banned weapons against civilians. This was in spite of objections by Russia at the time and in spite of evidence from independent investigators that the CW incident was a provocation staged by anti-government militants.
Subsequent reports by the OPCW later in 2018 and 2019 distort the incident in such a way as to indict the Syrian government and retrospectively exculpate the Western powers over their “retaliatory” strikes.
However, the whistleblower site Wikileaks has released more internal communications provided by 20 OPCW experts who protest that senior officials at the organization’s headquarters in The Hague engaged in “doctoring” their field reports from Syria.
Copies of the doctored OPCW reports are seen to have suppressed important evidence casting doubt on the official Western narrative claiming that the Syrian government was to blame. That indicates the OPCW was engaged in a cover-up to retrospectively “justify” the air strikes by Western powers. This is a colossal scandal which implies the US, Britain and France wrongly attacked Syria and are therefore guilty of aggression. Yet, despite the gravity of the scandal, Western media have, by and large, ignored it. Indicating that these media are subordinated by their governments’ agenda on Syria, rather than exposing the truth as independent journalistic services.
An honorable exception is Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson who has given prominence to the scandal on US national TV. So too has veteran British journalist Peter Hitchens who has helped expose the debacle in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.
Apart from those sources, the mainstream Western media have looked away. This is an astounding dereliction of journalistic duty to serve the public interest and to hold governments to account for abusing power.
Major American news outlets have been engrossed in the Trump impeachment case over his alleged abuse of power. But these same media have ignored an arguably far more serious abuse of power with regard to launching missiles on Syria over a falsehood. That says a lot about the warped priorities of such media.
However, their indifference to the OPCW scandal also reflects their culpability in fomenting the narrative blaming the Assad government, and thereby setting up the country for military strikes. In short, the corporate media are complicit in a deception and potentially a war crime against Syria. Therefore they ignore the OPCW scandal.
That illustrates how Western news media are not “independent” as they pompously claim but rather serve as propaganda channels to facilitate their governments’ agenda.
An enlightening case study was published by Tareq Haddad who quit from Newsweek recently because the editors censored his reports on the unfolding OPCW scandal. Haddad explained that he had important details to further expose the OPCW cover-up, but despite careful deliberation on the story he was inexplicably knocked back by senior editors at Newsweek who told him to drop it. There is more than a hint in Haddad’s insider-telling that senior staff at the publication are working as assets for Western intelligence agencies, and thus able to spike stories that make trouble for their governments.
Given the eerie silence among US, British and European media towards the OPCW scandal it is reasonable to posit that there is a systematic control over editorial policies about which stories to cover or not to. What else explains the blanket silence?
The scandal comes as Western powers are attempting to widen the powers of the OPCW for attributing blame in such incidents. Russia has objected to this move, saying it undermines the authority of the UN Security Council. Given the scandal over Syria, Russia is correct to challenge the credibility of the OPCW. The organization has become a tool for Western powers.
Russian envoy to the OPCW and ambassador to the Netherlands Alexander Shulgin says that Moscow categorically objects to expanding the OPCW’s functions and its powers of attributing blame. The extension of powers is being recommended by the US, Britain and France – the three countries implicated in abusing the OPCW in Syria to justify air strikes against that country.
The Russian envoy added:
“The OPCW’s attribution mechanism is a mandate imposed by the US and its allies, which has nothing to do with international law and the Chemical Weapons Convention’s provisions. Any steps in this direction are nothing more than meddling in the UN Security Council’s exclusive domain. We cannot accept this flagrant violation of international law.”
Thus, the OPCW – a UN body – is being turned into a rubber-stamp mechanism by Western powers to legalize their acts of aggression. And yet despite the mounting evidence of corruption and malfeasance, Western corporate media studiously ignore the matter. Is it any wonder these media are losing credibility? And, ironically, they have the gall to disdain other countries’ media as “controlled” or “influence operations”.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 18:25 - Iowa Man Gets 16 Years For Burning LGBTQ Flag; Gay Rights Group Says Excessive
Iowa Man Gets 16 Years For Burning LGBTQ Flag; Gay Rights Group Says Excessive
A 30-year-old Iowa man has been sentenced to 16 years behind bars after tearing down a gay pride rainbow flag from the front of a church and burning it – a sentence one prominent gay rights group thinks is excessive.
Adolfo Martinez was found guilty of a felony hate crime and third-degree harassment after he ripped the flag off the front of the United Church of Christ in Ames, Iowa – before walking over to the Dangerous Curves Gentleman’s Club, where he was reportedly a regular.
Martinez received the maximum sentence due to his status as a habitual offender with two prior felonies. He told KCCI in June that he destroyed the flag because he despises homosexuality, according to the Washington Examiner.
“It was an honor to do that. It was a blessing from the Lord,” said Martinez. “It is a judgment, and it is written to execute vengeance on the heathen and punishments upon the people,” he added. “I burned down their pride. Plain and simple.”
Martinez pleaded not guilty despite saying he had no plans to fight the charges and claiming, “I’m guilty. Guilty as charged.”
The senior minister at the United Church of Christ, Rev. Eileen Gebbie – who is gay, said “It doesn’t feel good. However, it’s not going to slow us down. We won’t change.”
She told the Des Moines Register that she’s happy Martinez was found guilty, though she told NBC that 16 years was excessive.
“I often experienced Ames as not being as progressive as many people believe it is, and there still is a very large closeted queer community here,” Gebbie explained. “But 12 people that I don’t know, who have no investment in me or this congregation, said this man committed a crime, and it was crime born of bigotry and hatred.”
“Hate crimes against the LGBTQ community are a serious matter as they inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and strike fear into the communities they target,” Reyes told NBC News. “That said, true justice should always strive to be about rehabilitation, reconciliation, and healing communities. It is difficult to see how a 16-year prison sentence accomplishes any of those goals.”
“He is our neighbor, and I would be glad to know him and to welcome him here to this space,” as he approaches 50 years of age upon his release.
Excessive…
According to NBC News, the director of gay advocacy group One Iowa, Courtney Reyes, thinks that the sentence is excessive, and says that while her organization appreciates how quickly the incident was handled, the sentence was excessive.
“Hate crimes against the LGBTQ community are a serious matter as they inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and strike fear into the communities they target,” Reyes told NBC News. “That said, true justice should always strive to be about rehabilitation, reconciliation, and healing communities. It is difficult to see how a 16-year prison sentence accomplishes any of those goals.“
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 18:05 - A Plot To Make Pelosi President? Now Adam Schiff Wants To Go After VP Mike Pence…
A Plot To Make Pelosi President? Now Adam Schiff Wants To Go After VP Mike Pence…
Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,
I was really hoping that this wouldn’t happen.
Within hours of President Trump being impeached by the House, the mainstream media was reporting that Adam Schiff “has declared war” on Mike Pence. At this time of the year, most Americans are celebrating holidays and spending time with their families, but Adam Schiff continues to be deeply focused on his twisted obsession to take down the Trump administration. When Rachel Maddow asked him if he was “actively looking at Vice President Mike Pence and his role in this scandal”, Schiff made it quite clear that he has targeted Pence.
Is Schiff doing this because he wants “justice”, or is there some deeper plot afoot?
Before we get into the specifics, let’s talk about a hypothetical scenario in which Nancy Pelosi could actually become the President. If President Trump is removed from office by the Senate, Vice-President Mike Pence would move into the Oval Office and a replacement for Pence would be nominated. But if Trump and Pence were both impeached and removed from office before a new Vice-President could be nominated and confirmed, then the next in line for the presidency would be Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
In other words, if Trump and Pence were both suddenly out of the picture, Nancy Pelosi would become the President of the United States.
We have never actually seen the speaker of the House become the president in such a manner, and such a scenario would appear to be exceedingly unlikely, but it could hypothetically happen.
Up to now, the efforts by the Democrats to get rid of Trump have not gone well. According to a brand new survey that was just released, only 42 percent of all Americans support removing Trump from office at this point. And it is likely that support for removing Vice-President Pence from office would be even lower.
So why would the Democrats even bother trying?
I certainly can’t explain why Schiff suddenly has such a desire to go after Pence, because it doesn’t seem to be rational. According to the Daily Mail, Schiff has made the decision to declare “war” on Pence…
House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff has declared war on Vice President Mike Pence, barely a week after his panel finished its hearings on the impeachment of President Donald Trump.
As an impeachment vote loomed Wednesday, Schiff demanded Pence’s office declassify documents that he claims could show the vice president knee-deep in the Ukraine scandal that has brought Trump to the brink.
What Schiff is particularly obsessed about is a phone call between Vice-President Pence and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on September 18th.
Pence’s adviser Jennifer Williams listened in on that call, and she testified about it behind closed doors to Schiff’s committee. Her testimony was later classified, and Schiff has been badgering Pence to have it declassified. The following comes from the National Review…
Pence’s Russia adviser Jennifer Williams testified last month about the vice president’s September 18 phone call with Ukranian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Schiff requested ten days later that Pence declassify her testimony, contained in a November 26 letter from her lawyer, but Pence last week declined to do so in a letter to Schiff.
On Tuesday, Schiff sent a letter to Pence alleging that the testimony given by Williams “raises profound questions about your knowledge of the President’s scheme to solicit Ukraine’s interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election”.
In other words, Schiff is inferring that Vice-President Pence “abused his power” just like Trump supposedly did.
During a subsequent appearance on the Rachel Maddow Show, Schiff was specifically asked if he was “actively looking” at Vice-President Pence…
Are you actively looking at Vice President Mike Pence and his role in this scandal? And should we expect further revelations either related to the vice president or related to the other core parts of these allegations that have resulted in this impeachment tonight?
In response, he gave an answer that was classic Schiff …
Well, we have acquired a piece of evidence, classified submission by Jennifer Williams, something that she alluded to in her open testimony that in going back and looking through her records, she found other information that was pertinent to that phone call that we asked her about and made that submission. There is nothing that should be classified in that submission but yet, the vice president’s office has said they’re going to assert classification, or it’s classified.
It is not proper to classify something because it would be embarrassing or incriminating, and that summation does shed light on the vice president’s knowledge, and we think the American people should see it. Certainly, any senators in the trial should have access to it.
Schiff has got to realize that his actions are deeply dividing America, and the drama currently unfolding in Washington could set in motion a series of events that could tear this nation apart.
So why is he doing it?
Well, there is always the possibility that he could be so deluded that he actually believes that he is doing the right thing. And if he truly believes that he is seeking to have justice done, then that would help to explain why he just won’t let this thing go.
But the truth is that Schiff’s sick obsession with taking down the Trump administration goes back long before this Ukraine scandal first broke wide open.
Like so many other Democrats, he just can’t stand to see Donald Trump in the White House, and he won’t rest until he is gone for good.
If the Democrats could find a way to get Trump removed from office early next year, that would throw the Republican Party into a state of utter chaos and would give Democrats a massive edge heading into November 2020. And if they could get Mike Pence removed from office early next year as well, that would make it even tougher for the Republican Party.
In the end, maybe that is what all of this is primarily about. Yes, getting Nancy Pelosi into the White House would be a nice side benefit, but maybe what the Democrats really want to do is to keep Trump from winning again in 2020 by any means necessary.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, nothing they are doing is working.
It looks like Trump is going to be acquitted by the Senate, public approval for impeachment has been falling, and Trump now has a lead against all potential Democratic contenders.
If the Democrats had never attempted to remove Trump, they would have had a great chance of winning the White House next November.
But they just couldn’t resist, and so they have set the stage for a major political disaster for the Democratic Party less than a year from now.
Tyler Durden
Fri, 12/20/2019 – 17:45
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